
















.* v a - Ws0? ■' ** % 

■%. % %?!■*?* * -. 

■o */ 0 ,0 < 

A, IV * 1 8 * <p 

^ ‘-3 0° O r%»A + 


A 


0 


;' S> * 3 N 0 ’/. «*»So *" 1 * V\ 

^ *- '% A x * $>% n '' ** 

V T> « V w 

- 2 '- . > 2 
r * c- ^ ^ 


<*• . 
* 


o V* 

r ' <?V \V 

\ ° V 


' -.mm: A% ^ 

* ' ^ .i,/- -^ x ' * «S ■» A 

x \ A v 'A ''<*'' A C * 0 * v ■* A 

> ‘° V °- J' c 

s'- sg-/r7??b * 'r *\ 







<1 y>> z 

J V. ° -V o ? f , 


r P y ' ‘ - * 0 O 

* > A^ «A*°* ^ 

<* - A' 9- <a cx o -© 

v \x 





c* £- \ o • 4* y * 

* <M A * .9 N 0 ' 

. ^ V\s^'* > I 

■fu A 


A A ‘ A r) 

5 ^°" 

J,V' * ' * 0 ' f V C 

' % A « \ A * 

^ ^ “ mM: A z ^ v 

® jkV </> _ c. .>> y 

** *■ a a ' <§gg|v: - v © 

^ ■* * V- y^mj^ry A *?■ 

X ^ A X 0 N C '\ ^ * * * ' S A y X ft ’ y 0 * A X ' 

\S> f 0 ^ /> r\v a v 1 " o, A\ o ^ <i 

7^ a ~rv ^ /C f 'VJ \ ^ AT> 'c 

v *' .. , 0 *tmc* ^ A 

> ® ^ 

? ^ * i 1 * c ’ r " - ° 

^ $* f <hr ' 

v* A * •** UVVT "\ 

„>'.0° O o % 

. ° 7 r 

^ V ^SUA ^ -A - . ' 



^*.,->>•' v ^ s ,, v 
?'. % . V v' S -V^ 

fi: **f ; 

. c. G 



0 M 




’ * 'tv 

% ■< a 

V* 

ii v v' r i 

' * 0 
^ O A 




^ A 


0 N 


S? v- • ” / ^ 

" a <A + tZ. '■■•: * yf> 

' A A :M%\ a* 
.* v v -. iniv 

*V *0 '*>" 

a\ , o N c . */> a * . , 

aSN v* Q O f\^ <• v 

A * / -b c,° x v r? 

' x_ _\ " .sfMz 

•» o o * *■■ J 1 

» V I 

' / A '^%S 
/ 


S ^ V . 


O t- " Z '£ /t/ ”-V X c >' ~J 

V ».,!*^ .... q ^-* 0 















« \ S V 

’ A - -rw ** 

m\ ***** : 

t* >* *Z 




o> 


\ %/: r mk*S 


* xV </> 

* ,\V '/>- 




<?' V A V V, * ^4~~W * *, 

y, * ,-» V* $ ’ ■ ' *^» , •/* " X v O’ 

”♦ -*b '” S 'o^' .' i . » ^ '»* ^ N \ N „s e %"' ..s' <0 

*■ , ~J C V' s ,. Ov, AX' Iw A' r-, r\ ► , ■» 

v’ a *_ jY?'7--> 1 'P < o s —t'Cv / ,-U \ 

* :#§»: ; |A: w ; 

«^ S \^ V * '> . 0 ' <? ** \ '* 
v * s Lo*^ > A v A*<A 'c* V v A A 

>. -v ^ ft 5a * ^ X ' W>*. A 




A> A' 
V 


*<> 


® ^ ^ * .. ; t 

A 1 I, , ^■ Mr - #"% ° y V>%\K'- *< 

•> °'**\\ A ONC A° V , 1B >, •'O*^ / 

« ^ ^ C° *.'© AAA V ' * A X 

- ° ' v -r ^ a " 


“ x>‘ </> Z 

- <0 * 


-rf. <" 




/ x-j rv > . -» jv c 

" ^ v v i4 

\° °xr. 

> ' 

rU s <* 0 r\ , 

S v ,., %. » aK 0’ ^0-’ °c % 

. -- ^ *- % / ^ 

- ^ *- - 

■* A - ^ ,«v 

V/ A ^ 6 S ' <SA*“ \ . V/ ^ A 4 f > 1 0 . *> 5 

»,« « >, ( Aw « V ' « a A ' 0 N C . /-X 7 * * S "N 

H ■ O- ,'VJ A *>• AXV c « O C^ 1 : 

0 a -f -P AO’ o ojv. /• vt) rv \ 


//>7 ° ^ V ° 

o v> <<, O 

v . \L V ^ 





*•■’* Vv'V-' 


* V 


, .«.* ci- ^ , 

\ * v’?’ & * n 

. \ .%**■/ ^ 0 

v Owv. ^ ^ % V v 

•' 5^ V - 

a a^ ^ - %13=f« <> o 

^ ”'' /t-^K '** "cf> '“">"„<■ 

; -oo' :*w^~ * +>■ v* 

s a. 







v \ 

■« 'A V 


,0 c> 


V" ^ 


^ ^;'»\/ % *■» 

^ .. V .‘W< ^. ,/v'" 0 ' ° 


& 



Mh'° ^/>,\^ x ’ 


J « ,0 v * v 8 




A 
V* V 


♦ *p 



' o^ 1 ^ "- 

. - ~ ^ ^ w - .. 
o V x * A O -v / s <0^ 

//r*,\ " ,v v- 



















































r 







ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Sy &0BOT0 Hamilton 

The Blue Room 
Scandal 
Who Cares? 

His Friend and His Wife 
The Sins of the Children 
The Blindness of Virtue 
The Miracle of Love 
The Rustle of Silk 
The Door That Has No Key 
Another Scandal 



ANOTHER SCANDAL 


BY 

COSMO HAMILTON 

\\ 


NON-REFEF 

Cf 

ITi 

< 

MM 

y 

UU 


> 

CO 


£ 

< 

X 

pljp? 


i/i 

|§IJV&(§gl 


O 

tm£=j 

4 

2 


0 

Ln 

SWVAO • Q3S 


BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1923 

CoHpAA 

\ <5 











YL*> 

V\ 

' h~ 

“W 4 


Copyright, 1923, 

By Cosmo Hamilton. 

All rights reserved 

Published September, 1923 



Printed in the United States of America 

SEP 13’23 

©C1A711852 

*VI\} V 



ANOTHER SCANDAL 



ANOTHER SCANDAL 


PART I 
I 

April had come over the hill. 

And when Franklin crossed the road from the golf 
course, vaulted the low wall of his garden, and went 
up the path that was lined with regiments of crocuses, 
he might have seen many changes made by long soft 
hours of sun and new born hope. 

But he was in no mood for these things. All he 
saw was the picture that he had carried in his mind 
all day and for many days, and which had flung him 
into tortures of anxiety, being a man who knew 
nothing of women. 

Lying in one cane chair with her feet on another, 
an unread book in her lap, and a new light in her eyes, 
was the girl whom he loved beyond the interpretation 
of words, and was in terror about because she was 
going to have a baby. 

Of all girls this one, sitting still, in deliberate lone¬ 
liness, with her feet on a chair, her face turned up 
to an early star, and a smile on her lips that he had 
never seen before. Of all girls this one, whose young, 
slim beauty had enchanted his heart, whose restless 
energy had been sufficient to turn a mill and drive the 


2 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


engines of a ship, devise a hundred forms of dare- 
deviltry, and bring a horse home quivering with 
fatigue. Of all girls, Beatrix, sitting alone, with her 
eyes on a star, and that smile on her lips . . . and 
her feet on a chair. 

She turned, sensing him and his love, and waved 
her hand. And with a sort of stumble, he went up, 
and knelt at her side with his head in her lap. “ Oh 
God,” he said, knowing nothing of women, “ What 
have I done to you? What brutes men are.” 

And she put her lips to his hair and laughed. 


He had forced himself to play golf all day, — that 
day when not in tears but laughing, April had come 
over the hill. He had played thirty-six holes with the 
grim concentration apparently of the born golfer, — 
they are hardly ever made, — but in reality of the man 
in a futile effort to escape from the nagging of self- 
reproach. All spring had danced across the course, 
and winter, limping in the hollow places, had been 
driven out of sight. The fickle procession had come 
up to the music of soft winds, broken into gay dis¬ 
order, and put the spirit of youth in everything. With 
fear in his soul, knowing nothing of women, he had 
missed it all, and set a pace to the game which had 
brought the others of the foursome to the end of the 
day with relief. All day long he had raced from 
green to green, — jaw set, a deep line between his eyes, 
and a sort of anger that found no relief in beating the 
ball, — Pelham Franklin, that hearty, good-natured 
fellow, with that short infectious laugh, and all the 
luck in the world. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


3 


At the sixth hole of the first round, the short hole, 
on a green balanced neatly at the edge of a brook, old 
woods to right and left, the meeting place of rabbits 
before the sun had drunk the dew, Amery had touched 
young Doubleday on the arm, and spoken behind his 
hand. “ What’s the trouble? Row with the wife do 
you suppose, or a bad money loss ? One or the other, 
must be.” 

“Must be. Something lashing him even harder 
than he’s lashing the ball. D’you think he’s told 
anything to Hutchinson? ” 

“ My dear chap, he doesn’t tell. Gets a thing on his 
chest and it sticks. You couldn’t get a word out of 
Franklin with a corkscrew.” 

“ Well, we’re in for a strenuous day. Probably we 
shall hole out the last putt on our knees in the dark, 
and totter home for a rest cure.” 

But the game had been brought to an end before 
the light had failed. Amery, Doubleday, and Hutch¬ 
inson, bachelors, and not particularly gifted with 
imagination, had driven away together, leaving Frank¬ 
lin in the middle of the deserted dressing room, cursing 
the missing shoehorn. He had refused a lift, and, 
with inexhaustible energy, was going to walk home 
across the course. The garden of his cottage was only 
a stone’s throw from the fourteenth green, the private 
road intervening. 

The sun had gone, but there were streaks of faint 
colors in the sky. Four children were playing on a 
tennis court, and their young high voices vied with the 
screaming of swifts that zigzagged about the club 
house. A lonely and heroic member was driving ball 
after ball down into the long smooth dip of the first 
hole in the forlorn endeavor of curing a slice, — and 


4 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


as Franklin started to walk home over grass that still 
had its spongy places, he paused to speculate. “ What 
the deuce is wrong with P. F. ? He’s been looking 
like that for weeks. Of all men alive he has nothing 
to worry about, — money to burn, no factories to 
break into a strike, the health of an ox, and that girl 
for a wife. . . . Now then, you. Eye on the ball, 
wrist well over, head well down. ...” 

The smell of cut grass in the air once more, the 
voice of a bird in the woods again, the face of one star 
high up in the sky . . . and she put her lips to his 
hair and laughed. 

But was there anything to laugh at in this ? 

Here was a man who had been married for eighteen 
untranslatable months; a devoted lover, — even per¬ 
haps too devoted because he was willing to sacrifice 
common sense at any moment and hand all his cher¬ 
ished illusions on a plate to his wife if she as much as 
hinted at her need of them for a moment’s amuse¬ 
ment; who knew so little of women and had spent so 
much of his time away from the beaten track with 
men, that he was now agonized with sympathetic fear 
at what was to his wife, although young and without 
experience, a perfectly natural event. Here was that 
rather rare person a born husband, — most men 
becoming husbands by accident, and remaining acci¬ 
dental. A good sportsman, he said what he meant and 
stuck to it. He had no complexes; nothing of the 
artistic temperament which makes the marriage con¬ 
tract a scrap of paper because it is another term for 
the complete inability to conform to the rules of any 
honest game. He was as clear and open as running 
water, able rather than merely clever, as loyal as a 
dog, and just as grateful for small mercies; curiously 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 5 

without conceit except for his ability to make trout 
flies; hot tempered, and in no sense of the word a 
pacifist. He had none of the hypocrisy of those cow¬ 
ards who, upon receiving a smack in the face, turn the 
other cheek in order to make their opponents ashamed 
to hit again. When hit he hit back, straight from the 
shoulder and above the belt. He was elemental, like a 
boy, and had no affectations of sophistication or cyni¬ 
cism. He was as far away from that futile group 
that goes by the name of intelligentsia as a salmon 
from an artificial pool. And deep down in his soul, 
though wholly unknown to himself, there was a 
groping spirituality that sent him out of civilization 
into nature, out of ugliness into the beauty of the 
by-paths and the sea. 

His young wife, the Vanderdyke girl as she was 
still sometimes called, whose escapades before her mar¬ 
riage were even now remembered by people whose 
memories were not among the things they particularly 
cultivated, and whose autocracy as the only daughter 
of one of the excessively rich men of America had 
earned a million paragraphs in the obsequious columns 
of the newspapers, knew all these things in Franklin, 
and loved him for them. And when she found herself 
gradually and gradually less able to carry on her old 
routine, her sweepingly individualistic habits of life, 
because of the wonderful thing which had made her 
undergo a complete volte face, and filled her with a 
sense of pride and responsibility, the attitude of this 
man seemed perfectly natural too. It was all part and 
parcel of his idealism and his ignorance, his chivalry 
and his adoration, his belief in woman as a delicate 
thing to be treated with exquisite care and tenderness, 
— a mystery and a miracle almost. It pleased her 


6 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


awfully, and did something to her vanity that was 
very warming. It hurt her a little, too, because she \ 
could see that, as time went on, he began to look at her 
with a sort of surprise and bewilderment which made 
her feel as though she were a stranger, — as though 
she had altered herself as women do when they fall 
victim to a new fashion, and bob their hair, or have 
their eyebrows moved. Often she told herself, sitting 
alone after her regular routine of exercise, thinking 
forward, building dreams, keenly and amazingly aware 
of being the bearer of new life, thinking back to her 
former self with astonishment, and waiting with cour¬ 
age for the future, that she had not deserved the deep, 
strong, deathless love of the man at her feet. And 
when she laughed it was not to deride his agony of 
mind, the suffering that gave him bad nights and 
hours of self-reproach which were the completest 
proofs of the sort of tenderness and fright that lift 
marriage to its greatest height; but in the hope of 
putting confidence where there was no confidence, of 
making light of a thing that was not light, of render¬ 
ing commonplace an event that was one of the wonders 
of the world. But how could she say all this? What 
could she do to soothe and justify and explain when 
he refused to do more than let her see the jangle of 
his brain by the look in his eyes and a sudden blurting 
of words immediately arrested? She must be twice a 
mother, she told herself, in this time of twofold 
responsibility, and give to her husband now all the 
kindness that she must presently give to his child; 
encourage him to keep as much as possible out of the 
sight of her, and send him out to work off the effects 
of imagination by playing golf in the companionship 
of men. 





ANOTHER SCANDAL 


7 


April having come over the hill that day they stayed 
on in the waning light. But he had nothing more to 
say about the state of his feelings. It wasn’t fair. In 
fact he set himself as usual to rub out the effect of his 
brief uncontrol by playing the ultra-normal man. His 
voice was good and his manner was excellent, but he 
forgot about his eyes. “ We had a pretty hard game,” 
he said. “ Course in fair condition. They all turned 
up, — Hutchinson, Amery, and Doubleday.” 

There was something crawling down her neck and 
she wanted to take one of her hands away. But he 
held them tight, and it didn’t much matter. “ Who 
was your partner, — Amery in a new tie?” 

“ No, Hutchinson, and I wish it had been you. We 
went round twice. I don’t know how the game came 
out.” 

“ You don’t know! ” 

“ No. I wasn’t looking.” 

Another star, and another, and another. On the 
light breeze the faint suggestion of lilac, and in his 
eyes — what? Pride? No, but wait. Jealousy? 
Yes, already. Fright again? Always. . . . Oh, why 
didn’t he let himself go for once, and get rid of all 
the stored-up emotion that made him like an unex¬ 
ploded bomb. Poor dear old Pel! It was almost dark, 
and in a few minutes it would be difficult to see his face 
and eyes. But she stayed out to give him the chance 
to confess and confide, so that she might comfort and 
control. She felt astonishingly firm and matronly. 

“ That wasn’t much like you,” she said, throwing 
a line. 

“ I don’t feel much like me,” he answered, catching 
it, but letting it go at once. “It’s the weather I sup¬ 
pose, or something. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. ’ It 


8 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


wasn’t fair to worry her with his anxieties; it wasn’t 
fair when he had brought her to a pass like this, and 
made her sit all day, alone and quiet, with her feet on 
a chair. ... Of all girls, — Beatrix! What brutes 
men are. 

And so she went off at a tangent for a moment. 
“ The course is looking awfully well already,” she 
said. 

“ How on earth do you know that? ” 

“ My dear, good Pel, I’m not an invalid. I’m per¬ 
fectly well and strong, and when I think there’s no¬ 
body looking, I stump all over the course every day. 
I’m only going to have a baby, you know.” 

Only going to have a baby! “ But, — are you sure 
you ought to do that now? I shall change doctors if 
Mallett can’t take the trouble to look after you. Laugh 
then, but this is frightfully serious, and if I had my 
way I wouldn’t allow you to walk a yard. Bee, for 
God’s sake take care of yourself.” 

She finished her laugh and kissed him. Were all 
men made cowards by the women they loved? And 
was it because they played so small a part in this deed 
of bearing life that they felt obliged to develop so 
huge and delightful an egotism in support of self- 
respect ? They did everything else so much better than 
women. This was really a tremendous blow to their 
vanity. And yet, in a final analysis, how many of 
them would undertake the whole responsibility so that 
they might capture all the credit? 

“ I am taking care of myself, dear old boy,” she 
said. “ And you’re taking care of me too. But I’ve 
got to get exercise, you know, and carry on normally. 
So please don’t go and glare at Dr. Mallett and 
threaten to break his neck. For one thing he’s smaller 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


9 


than you are, and for another he knows his job. Don’t 
worry, Pel.” Perhaps the fact that she took it for 
granted that he was worrying would open a small hole 
in his stubborn fourth wall ? 

But no. This was a conspiracy of unselfishness. 
Both these young people who stood at the first great 
crisis of love were determined to hide the true state 
of their feelings behind a barricade of reserve until 
one of them broke down. “ Oh, Pm not worrying,” 
he said. “ Not an atom. Oh, Lord no. As you say, 
what is there to worry about? You’re only going to 
have a baby. That’s easy enough.” He would not, 
in spite of all temptation, be a bigger brute than ever 
by inflicting her with his fright, — amazing as it was 
to find her unafraid. The thing to do was to take it as 
light-heartedly as she did, — a matter of very little 
importance. But as he put her hand to his lips he 
contradicted this effort at an attitude by the vibration 
of his anxiety. 

And so it went on. Not all her shrewdness and sud¬ 
den tangents, not all her cunning charm and seductive 
flashes of smile, not even the light caress of her fingers 
could draw him out. He loved her too well. He made 
conversation. He talked commonplaces. He refused 
the chance. And so at last she asked him to help her 
up. They were dining at eight, and must go in and 
dress. That night, when they were alone again, she 
would exert herself again to make him speak so that 
she might let him see that he was not a brute even if 
he had metaphorically put her feet on a chair, and 
anchored her energy to a porch, but what he had done 
was what she had needed, both of him and of life. 


10 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


II 

It was to be one of those family affairs which 
Franklin always dreaded; a monthly dinner at which 
precisely the same things were said at almost precisely 
the same moments by the parents and the nearest rela¬ 
tions of his young and amazingly different wife, a girl 
who bore, Heaven was to be thanked, no remote resem¬ 
blance to any of them. Mr. Vanderdyke, more than 
ever like a caricature by Max Beerbohm of a limp 
and over-leisured member of the House of Lords who 
had collected everything under the sun in order to give 
himself a series of false occupations and was now 
waiting himself to be collected into a future as to 
which he had been totally unable to make up his mind; 
Mrs. Vanderdyke, that earnest worker against en¬ 
croaching age, tightened up by every known astringent, 
and poured into one of those dresses that can only be 
worn by a woman whose mind has conquered matter; 
Aunt Honoria Vanderdyke, honest, simple, and down¬ 
right, with her hair white, and her fine, strong face as 
unmade-up as that of a French peasant; Uncle Barnet 
Thatcher, an amiable terrier who barked from time to 
time, and wagged his little tail, looked roguish, and 
drank too much, becoming portentously solemn about 
nothing, taking every opportunity even when nobody 
was listening to him of predicting new catastrophes in 
a now totally unastonished world, and shaking his 
head when he mentioned the names of any of the 
political leaders who continued without any power of 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 11 

interference to go from one deplorable muddle to 
another. 

At the best of times Franklin did not look forward 
to these affairs. Under the existing circumstances, 
when his nerves were all flying about like screaming 
swallows, they filled him with irritation that bordered 
on blasphemy. He knew that Major Thatcher would 
immediately pull him aside and ask him with a mix¬ 
ture of mystery and roguishness, “How is she?” as 
if she ought not to be like that at all. He knew that 
Mr. Vanderdyke would stand aloof like a disembodied 
spirit, draw his fingers through his melancholy mous¬ 
tache, and eye him with a sort of mild resentment 
which would make him want to say, “ But, my dear 
Sir, you quite forget that I have married your daugh¬ 
ter.” As for Mrs. Vanderdyke, dominated by her chin 
line, she would once again adopt the silly half-smile 
of the woman who asks everybody to remark that she 
will soon be numbered among the freaks of the world 
by becoming a grandmother, — “ I, who do not look 
a day older than dear Bee’s elder sister, — a grand¬ 
mother! Isn’t it too deliciously absurd! ” And this, 
of course, would make Franklin frightfully keen to do 
something unkind and even cruel, — hand her a look¬ 
ing glass, for instance, tilt up a lamp shade and say, 
“ Can’t you see that you look older than the Sphinx? ” 

In the days after the return from the honeymoon, 
when Beatrix was just as she had been before he had 
married her, these family affairs were rather amusing. 
They had reminded Franklin of the little dinners of 
the smaller royalties whom he had met before the war 
at such places as Biarritz, of people who knew each 
other far too intimately, and spent the greater part of 
their lives in far too close juxtaposition so that they 


12 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


anticipated each other’s remarks, and made no effort 
to disguise boredom and that note of family contempt 
which vibrates through all the minor castles of Europe. 

He thanked God that this would be the last ordeal 
before Bee, — and drew up at the thought which 
stirred him once again to the old dogging fear, and 
made him ask himself for the thousandth time, “ If she 
doesn’t . , . Oh, God, she doesn’t get through ... ?” 


Everything happened in exactly the right order. 
The enormous car, devoid of all embellishments so 
that it looked self-consciously plain, arrived with utter 
punctuality. Mr. Vanderdyke had brought about this 
quite unnecessary feat by having goaded the members 
of his small party until they wished that some act of 
God or perfectly natural phenomenon would cause his 
death. He had gone up and down the passages of his 
pompous house like the call boy of a theatre, crying 
the time. The Major, who had never been in the 
Army, and being a bachelor had cut his time according 
to his own wishes, had very nearly been driven into a 
statement of his feelings, which would have put an end 
to long periods of great luxury at no cost to himself. 
Whenever the warning voice of his host and brother- 
in-law had made itself heard, accompanied by the 
pattering of his fingers on the door, something had 
happened. He had nicked himself with his safety 
razor, — always a simple thing to do. He had become 
red in the face and apoplectic because neither he nor 
his valet could jam a recalcitrant stud into the under¬ 
neath hole of an over-starched shirt. A shoelace had 
snapped at the very moment when the car rolled round 


ANOTHER SC AND ALT ' 1 ;• j <1-3 

to the front of the house. “ Oh, my God! ” he had 
cried finally, putting his noticeably little foot on the 
knee of his valet, “ What a hell of a lot of time these 
punctual people waste.” And he had sighed deeply 
for the peace and quiet of his bachelor apartment on 
East 39 th Street among the old brownstone houses of 
Murray Hill. Having the delightful gift of resilience 
his recovery was complete, however, by the time that 
he leaped jauntily from the car to hand the ladies out 
with the exaggerated gallantry that he had carried over 
from a period as dead as the Dodo. 

“ Charming, charming,” said Mrs. Vanderdyke, 
running her too wide eyes over Franklin’s cottage. 
“ So nicely done. A little house is so friendly, don’t 
you think? ” Any house was little to her which didn’t 
have thirty-six bedrooms, a ball room and an art 
gallery. 

To which Aunt Honoria, throwing a wink at the 
Major, added her usual comment, “ Perfect for a 
honeymoon. Before I die I shall hope to see another 
large wing added for the children.” 

It was the ritual always repeated on these occasions 
by these two good ladies who permitted themselves 
thereupon to be conducted upstairs by a nearly always 
different maid. The house was at least a mile from 
the nearest Picture Theatre. 

Franklin stalked out to meet Mr. Vanderdyke and 
the Uncle. Number one and number two remarks 
duly followed, — the “ How is she ? ” and the parental 
resentment. It was a ghastly business. The one 
bright spot about it all was that he had not married 
the family, that there was no necessity for him to live 
under the same roof with the people whose daughter 
he had led to the altar, and that there were at any rate 


14 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


nice long spaces between these royal visits during 
which he could call his wife his own, and forget that 
even she had been forced to come into the world in the 
usual manner. 

In his own room, the only one in the house upon 
which Beatrix had not laid her decorative hand, Frank¬ 
lin walked up and down like a caged lion while the 
Major inspected his trophies, and Mr. Vanderdyke 
wandered from corner to corner looking at nothing. 
There were at least ten minutes to kill before Mrs. 
Vanderdyke arrived in the drawing-room with Aunt 
Honoria and Beatrix, immediately upon which dinner 
would be announced. And so in order not to have to 
reply to exactly the same set of questions and remarks 
Franklin broke into a monologue. “ Wonderful 
weather,” he said. “If it goes on like this it won't 
be long before the greens recover themselves. The 
Irish are still fighting, I see, — in order probably to 
prove to the world once more how necessary it was 
for them to govern themselves. According to to-day’s 
paper, Lloyd George has returned to London after 
eating the lonely leek. Its juice will give him all the 
cunning he needs to stick to the Premiership. How 
about the bonus bill ? I should like to be in that Eng- 
land-to-America trip. I am a tremendous believer in 
the airship.” 

And so he went on, jumping from subject to subject 
like a riderless horse at a point-to-point meet, repeating 
headlines without a break, taking his unwilling listen¬ 
ers from Germany to Japan, from Washington to 
Westminster, from Poland to Panama, from Petro- 
grad to Wall Street. The effect upon Mr. Vander¬ 
dyke was painful. It made him feel like an empty 
paper bag in an eighty-mile gale. He spun round and 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 15 

round in the middle of the room like a private game of 
blindman’s buff. The Major was amused though a 
little annoyed because this rush of words did him out 
of making his usual jokes about the stuffed wildcat 
over the mantelpiece and the gargantuan tarpon over 
one of the bookcases, and the model of the Galatea 
which stood gracefully upon a table. He had cracked 
these little jokes so often that they had become second 
nature to him. 


Leaving Mrs. Vanderdyke in one of the guest rooms 
to remove the ravages made by the twelve-mile drive 
in the hermetically sealed limousine, Aunt Honoria 
went to the door of Beatrix’s room and knocked. She 
found the girl whom she loved as her own standing 
a little ruefully in front of the looking-glass, took her 
warmly into her arms and kissed her. 

And Beatrix said: “ Yes, not very long to wait 
now. It’s wonderful. I never imagined that there 
was anything like this in the world. I hardly know 
myself. Last year at this time ...” 

Aunt Honoria held her tighter. “ Last year at this 
time,” she said, “ we had hardly recovered from the 
joy and amazement of your marriage with Pelham, 
and all the anxiety that you had plunged us into at 
the last of your escapades. But I knew that this was 
all you needed to put you on your feet. Tell me about 
Pelham. He doesn’t look well.” 

And Beatrix gave her aunt a brief description of 
Pelham’s attitude, his anxiety, and his fear. And it 
was then that Aunt Honoria proved that although she 
was a spinster, she possessed a keen imagination and 


16 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


a most observant eye. She said, “ My dear, at no 
other time in a woman’s life can she so definitely 
plumb the depths of her husband’s love and character. 
One of two things invariably happens to a man when 
his wife is going to have a baby. Either he slips off 
at a tangent, being dishonest and without loyalty and 
self-restraint, and has an affair with another woman, 
or, being loyal, and having something infinitely better 
than passion, he goes through a crisis of distorted 
imagination, and gives birth to the child himself. 
You are lucky that Pelham belongs to the latter type. 
He’s the sort of man who redeems marriage from its 
absurdity and its selfishness. He is to be encouraged 
and dealt with very tenderly. He is like all real men 
and complete husbands. He possesses a strong streak 
of the woman in him. He won’t be well again until 
the great moment is passed. It won’t be much longer 
now.” 

“ No, not much longer now,” said Beatrix, with a 
catch in her voice. 


Then dinner, — old Mr. Vanderdyke eating with 
his usual suspicion and absolute certainty of punish¬ 
ment ; the Mother exercising a most reluctant self- 
restraint; the Aunt doing herself very well, being 
without the smallest concern as to what happened to 
her figure. What a gorgeous state of mind to have 
achieved. There was, however, one noticeable thing 
about that evening which made it different from all 
its predecessors. By her tact, patience, and subtle 
sense of humor Beatrix proved that she had begun to 
develop under her subjection to control, the subtle 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


17 


beauty of which had removed all impatience from her 
hitherto untrammeled spirit, and made her able to 
undergo such ordeals as these with calmness and even 
with pleasure. Although it is perfectly true that a 
leopard cannot change its spots or the Ethiopian his 
skin, it does not follow that the leopard may not 
develop new spots, or the Ethiopian powder his nose. 
What Aunt Honoria was fond of calling “ The Exer¬ 
cise of Motherhood'’, because probably she had dallied 
with Freud, had begun to make Beatrix calm, steady, 
satisfied, and very reasonable, — a new Beatrix, hardly 
recognizable as she played hostess with a sense of 
enjoyment which made Franklin almost forget that 
this was a family affair. She led the Major into the 
remembrance of his six stock jokes, and then laughed 
with an air of spontaneity that was masterly. She 
drew the Mother out on her one or two pet subjects, 
and then listened to the all too familiar words with 
affectionate deference. She treated the Father — 
whom she had never understood, because he had 
wound himself up in a maze of bewildering tangents — 
with the sort of kindness that is generally shown to a 
small boy at a party. He hardly ever opened his 
mouth, and when he did it was merely to begin a 
sentence and leave it in mid-air. But in his eyes there 
was always the same thing which she found impossible 
not to interpret. “ My dear, my dear, my dear. Let 
it be a boy. We need a boy. The family will run out 
without a boy.” In reply to which, fully realizing her 
responsibility, Beatrix always did the same thing. She 
patted the aimless, pale hand, smiled into the wander¬ 
ing eyes, and whispered back, “ I’ll do my best, Father 
dear, never fear! ” 

Many times during that particular evening, under- 


18 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


lying which, as she could see, there was a far deeper 
emotion and eagerness than in any of the others, Bea¬ 
trix was in a sort of way held up by the mental flash 
of herself as she was before she had met Franklin, — 
a young autocrat who had only to touch a bell to bring 
the sun, moon and stars as playthings to her feet, who 
had gone through life like all the other young things 
of her kind, with a complete disregard of law and 
order, supremely individualistic, with all the impudence 
and effrontery of modern youth, and its overwhelming 
selfishness. And when she looked back and saw her¬ 
self in some of the reckless incidents of her pre-mar¬ 
riage period, she found it hard to believe that she was 
now the pride of her family, the one person in the 
world to whom they looked to keep their name alive. 

Ten o’clock was the hour for the family withdrawal, 
and so the after dinner hiatus did not last beyond 
mortal endurance. As usual Mrs. Vanderdyke sat her¬ 
self at the piano, and played accompaniments to her 
little series of songs, — short songs, happily, and 
French. She had a nice, true, thin soprano, and gave 
herself all the airs of a prima-donna who condescended 
to sing from time to time in private. It was a fixed 
idea with her, — as it is with so many women who 
think that they can sing, and there are so many, — 
that if she had persisted in her training and had not 
sacrificed herself to her duties, she would have out¬ 
shone Farrar and driven Mary Garden into a back 
yard. She had at last grown out of that painful and 
pathetic period during which everything is subordi¬ 
nated to Voice, and become a retired star, and Oh, the 
difference to her friends! One good thing resulte I 
from her little orgy of egotism. It did away with thz 
necessity of discovering topics of conversation, and 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


19 


enabled the others to make themselves perfectly com¬ 
fortable, shut their eyes, and pass out for a little while. 
Her voice was no longer one of those which does pain¬ 
ful things to eardrums, and sends out vibrations which 
make even pictures squirm, and old furniture crack. 

There were several moments of rather disconcerting 
emotion before the family drove away. When, for 
instance, Mrs. Vanderdyke took Beatrix in her arms 
and kissed her good-night, saying with utter forget¬ 
fulness of her chin line, “ God bless you, my love. 
This is the last of our dinners before . . .” and 
choked a little. And again when the frail, nebulous 
man held his daughter’s hands more tightly than he 
had ever done, and made one more huge struggle to 
put into words the appeal and the prayer that had 
been in his eyes all that evening. And a third when 
the Major, out in the hall, smacked Franklin on 
the back with that overdone cordiality that goes with 
nearly all Majors, especially when they have never 
been in the Army, and said, “ It will soon be over now, 
my boy. A happy father before we meet again.” A 
perfectly natural, but nevertheless strikingly discon¬ 
certing remark, which put Franklin back into terror, 
and sent a red-hot needle through his solar plexus. 
Aunt Honoria’s one word to Franklin was “ Cour¬ 
age”, but it was a good word, and he needed it. 

It was not until the car had rolled out of hearing, 
with its two men on the box, and its nose in the air, 
that Franklin felt at home in his own house once more. 
“ Thank God that’s over,” he said. “ I mean . . 

“ That’s exactly what you do mean,” said Beatrix 
laughing. “ After all they’re my people, so it doesn’t 
matter how frank you are.” 


20 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

He put her hand to his lips. “ I tried to behave 
myself.” 

“ I saw you trying.” 

“ And did I?” 

She ran a finger across his small moustache. 
“ Dear old Pel, you always succeed when you try, and 
sometimes when you don’t.” 

He was grateful for those words of praise but a 
little touchy, being in a bad state, about the expression 
of endearment. “Not so infernally old,” he said. 
“ Only fifteen years older. Does that begin to seem 
so much? ” 

And she laughed again, — laughter being one of the 
things that he needed most just now. “ Fifteen years 
older? Fiddlesticks! I’m old enough to be your 
mother. I always was. I was born grown up, like 
the girl who breaks out of the egg in ‘ Back to 
Methuselah/ You know that. What are you now? 
Thirty-four? ” 

“ Yes,” he said. “ Thirty-four . . . that is to say 
I was thirty-five this year.” 

She waved- the whole subject aside with an airy 
gesture. “ Yes, but that isn’t what you want to talk 
to me about. Take the jump, old boy, and get it off 
your chest.” She talked his own language to encour¬ 
age him. Confession was good for the soul. 

He put his arms around her shoulders. He wanted 
to hold her as he used to do, but remembered. “ But 
I’ve nothing on my chest, darling, — I mean nothing 
to worry you about.” 

“ Make up something then,” she said. “ I’ve never 
been worried since I married you. It’ll do me good 
for a change.” And she put her lips on the tip of his 
chin. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


21 


“ Make up something? That’s easy. Of course I 
could grouse about this age question, my being thirty- 
five last month, and all that. I could manufacture a 
worry and say that I’m really much too old for you, 
and draw a gruesome picture of myself pottering 
about with hardening of the arteries and gout in both 
heels while you’re on the tip of your toes, a young and 
beautiful thing. t And then how about it? I shall be 
dear old Pel all the time then, the veteran hunter with 
broken knees, to be given a pat on the nose from time 
to time, and a bit of sugar.” 

Oh, so that had been nagging him, too, in those 
sleepless hours. “And you could say . . . Go on!” 
She moved her lips to his lips. 

And when he was able to speak he said, “ I could 
tell you something about jealousy if I knew how to 
say it, — and I don’t. The jealousy that comes from 
having handed you over to somebody else that you’re 
going to love much more than me.” 

“ We’ll see about that,” she said. “ Go on. Have 
another shot at it.” Would he never come up to the 
jump? 

“It’s . . . it’s this,” he said, going sideways still, 
but edging nearer and nearer, “ I’ve spoilt your fun. 
I’ve put you out of the running, — with your feet on 
a chair. I can’t get over that. You loathe me for it, 
you must.” 

She kissed him again, and put her ear to his mouth. 
“ Say it, say it,” she whispered. “ I want you to, —- 
I want you to.” 

And at last he said it, and it wasn’t much, with his 
face all white, and so strong an emotion that it made 
him shake from head to foot. “ It’s you, — like this. 
And it’s love. And it’s fear of the pain you’ve got to 


22 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


go through, and it’s terror at the thought of your 
leaving me here . . . ” 

But to Beatrix, who saw behind these stammering 
words, instantly, the shrouded figure that dogged this 
man, it was a very great deal indeed. So that was it. 
Death. 

“ Why don’t you laugh at me,” he said, because she 
didn’t speak. “ And tell me to shut up, — making an 
ass of myself like this.” 

“ Because I don’t want you to shut up,” she said, 
putting her arms around his neck, “ I want you to talk 
like this and be like this. It helps me, Pel, because 
I’m in a wee bit of a funk from time to time, — I 
don’t mind telling you that. But you mustn’t let me 
be. It won’t do. It mustn’t be allowed. You can go 
on being in a funk. It’s only fair that you should 
divide all this with me, the pain and the joy. Don’t 
bottle it up and keep it away. Don’t be afraid of 
worrying me. Come and tell me often, and the sight 
of your love will put me on my mettle and give me the 
pluck I shall need to come through smiling. And I’ve 
got to come through, Pel, for you, and the family. . . . 
Did you take a look at father to-night? Did you see 
what he had in his eyes all the time ? 4 A boy, a boy, 
a boy. Let it be a boy. The family needs a boy.’ 

. . . I’ve never done anything for the family yet and 
this is my chance, do you see? Say damn the family. 
I shan’t mind. Say you haven’t married my darned 
old family. That’d be perfectly true. But Pel, my 
dear, my dear, I’ve been a pretty average rotter, and 
I hurt my people, and I want to make up for it. You 
saved me once, and through your amazing love you’re 
going to save me again. I shall justify it now. . . . 
No, wait a minute. I haven’t finished yet. Let’s 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


23 


break down fourth walls to-night and indulge in a 
burst of ego. It’ll do us good, and who’s to stop 
us? . . . Two things come to me out there on the 
porch with my feet on a chair, again and again and 
again, and the first and the best is this. I love you so 
much, and so proudly, that all the pain seems nothing, 
no nothing, to the joy of bringing another you to life. 
That’s what puts the smile on my face. And the other 
is to do something for father that he’s never been 
able to do for himself, or collect or to buy with all 
his money, — give birth to a boy who shall belong to 
the family, and be called after him, and carry on. 
He’ll stop wandering then, come out of his corners, 
out of his maze, and materialize at last. He was dis¬ 
appointed. I ought to have been a boy. He’s never 
got over that, and I want tremendously, oh tremen¬ 
dously, to see that poor little old man with the pale 
hands that search for something, give his finger to my 
baby and have it grasped. . . . Understand that, Pel? 
But of course you do. You always understand. And 
I’ll wind up this outpouring that’s been on my chest 
as long as the fear has been on yours by telling you 
this. So listen and never forget, because I may never 
be able to say it again like this. ... I love you, my 
love. I love you as much as you love me, and more. 
And I respect you, and in addition to loving you I like 
you and admire you. I do. I do. And I’m going to 
get through because of that. You’re not too old, so 
stop thinking such rot, and if you imagine that I shall 
ever pat your nose and give you sugar, you’re wrong. 
I love you, and I shall be grateful and thankful to you 
and your love for ever and ever and ever.” 

She stood on tiptoe and kissed him with her heart 
on her lips. And, then she forgot that she had been 


24 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


born eighteen like the girl in “ Back to Methuselah,” 
put her face against his cold white shirt, and cried. 

“ Oh, God,” he said, “ Bee! ” This was worse than 
seeing her with her feet on a chair. But all the same, 
as he stood like a great hulking boy, afraid to hold her 
too tight, terribly anxious, absurdly and ingenuously 
afraid, his spirit, like a small and humble replica of 
himself, went down in supplication and thankfulness 
at the very feet of God. 

And presently, trying to appear as if they were not 
in the least ashamed of themselves, — and they weren’t, 
— they went upstairs, and there Pelham left Beatrix 
at the door of her room. 


“ I feel better,” said Beatrix, shutting the door and 
heaving a sigh. 

“ Better.” The word was echoed by the elderly 
person who was settled in the deep armchair with a 
lamp at her elbow as comfortably as a respectable hen 
in a warm hollow of earth. “ My dear, you haven't 
been feeling ill? ” 

“ Oh, no. Not ill. But vaguely in need of a tonic. 
And I have just had it, — a big strong dose. It came 
just at the right moment, and I shall sleep to-night 
without reading.” 

Mrs. Lester Keene slanted her head, and pursed her 
thin lips. “ Whose tonic? ” she asked with suspicion, 
having seen no bottle about. She had no use for the 
advertised medicine and a firm belief only in the indi¬ 
vidual prescription that is written in bastard Latin 
after a series of awkward questions by a medical prac¬ 
titioner of pompous appearance and shocking big bills. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


25 


She won a laugh for this. One of the reasons for 
her presence that night was her unconscious gift of 
winning laughs; the other that if she were not in that 
house she would be in one of those dull, drab, all-too- 
well regulated homes for indigent gentlewomen in 
which there is no such thing as imagination and hardly 
any humanity. “ That’s all right, Brownie. Don’t 
worry. I didn’t take it out of a bottle or a package, 
and it isn’t in tabloid form. But it was good, and I 
needed it. What in the world are you doing? ” 

What in the world should Mrs. Keene be doing 
under the circumstances but trying her eyes during 
hours of private ecstasy in the making of dozens of 
pairs of little socks which no self-respecting baby ever 
permits upon his feet? 

“She will need these,” she said with dignity. “ And 
it is the proper thing to do in any case. For pity’s 
sake, let’s be proper.” 

“I’m entirely with you,” said Beatrix. “ The habit 
of being proper has grown on me; but it will not 
be a she.” 

And for the reason that Mrs. Lester Keene loved 
Beatrix with a sort of fanaticism, and considered her 
to be the one beautiful thing on earth, there was an 
outburst of protest. “ No, please,” she said. “ Please 
don’t joke about this. Afterwards you may have a 
boy if you like; that would be very nice for the 
family. But I want your first child to be a girl, — 
like you. That is something that you owe to the 
world.” 

Love again, and egotism! 

In the old days, which were not after all so very 
old, this small brown woman had been engaged as a 
companion for Beatrix, — which is to say that she 


26 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


had been paid a salary and provided with a comfort¬ 
able room so that she might keep an eye on this girl 
and report anything that might seem to be reportable 
to Mrs. Vanderdyke or Aunt Honoria. In reality her 
duties were those of a private detective, and the word 
companion was in any case a misnomer because there 
could be nothing in common between Beatrix, bursting 
with superfluous energy and belonging to a generation 
totally out of sympathy with everything old, and an 
elderly woman who had gone through life cheerlessly, 
and in the narrow, bigoted atmosphere of the English 
middle-class. Her business in the Vanderdyke house 
had been just as absurd as if she had been appointed 
to the presidency of a society for the rescue of fallen 
women. She would have understood the mental atti¬ 
tude of the average girl of easy virtue as little as that 
of the only daughter of this fantastically rich family. 
She had been, of course, less of a companion than a 
perpetual nuisance and responsibility, comic to this 
girl of complete sophistication who knew perfectly well 
what she was behind her camouflage, and exactly when 
and why she slipped into the presence of her employer 
to tell her little story. There had been something in¬ 
escapably pathetic about this poor little lonely soul, 
whose husband had gone, whose relations could not be 
bothered, and who clung to life as to a spar in the 
sea. Her love and loyalty had been proved over and 
over again, especially during that amazing time when 
she had stuck to Beatrix and had helped her to escape 
from the scandal into which she had placed herself 
with York the portrait painter, and had won the 
friendship and the affection of this girl. After the 
marriage there had been no need of Mrs. Keene. Once 
more she had become a superfluous person, haunted 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


27 


with the terror of discharge, with little chance of 
finding a harbor in any other house. She knew noth¬ 
ing. She couldn't cook, having been what is called a 
lady. She was too old to learn, too middle-class to 
appeal as a social secretary to the snobbishness of the 
new-rich. She was merely driftwood, the wreckage 
of former respectability washed up on the shores of a 
strange country. And so Beatrix transferred her from 
servitude to friendship, and she now occupied a place 
in the Franklin house for reasons of sentiment and 
charity, — good reasons both. And although she got 
frequently in the way, and was nearly always a nui¬ 
sance, everything was done to make her feel that she 
was valuable and essential. Out of her glorious sense 
of humor Beatrix invented daily unusefulnesses for 
this woman to perform, and in the doing of this thing 
laid, quite unconsciously, a little bunch of flowers at 
the feet of the Madonna. It may have seemed an easy 
thing to do, but it was nothing of the sort because 
there was a certain aggressiveness in Brownie Keene 
that stirred irritation, and her continual “ don’ts ” 
were hard to put up with. Nevertheless, she was 
safely ensconced in a bedroom and sitting-room in 
Pelham’s cottage, and here she would remain happy, 
comfortable, and well fed, treated humanly and with 
affection for the remainder of her days. 


Alone, that night, in her charming low-ceilinged 
bedroom with its old panelling and Colonial four- 
poster, tail-boys, and dressing tables, its many hooked 
rugs with their primitive patterns and warm colors, 


28 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Beatrix went back over every word and unsaid word 
of her talk downstairs with Pelham. 

Already, then, he was a little jealous of the boy or 
girl that she was so eager to see, and touch, and 
wonder at, and adore, and of whose every sleeping 
move she was so exquisitely aware. Well, that was 
natural and excellent enough. He resented the fact 
that she had now to give herself up wholly and entirely 
to someone else when she was his and he wanted her. 
He had been forced to stand aside as lover and become 
husband for the first time. She would have been as 
jealous and probably grumbled a good deal more if it 
had been the other way round. She owned to it with 
that ready laugh of hers, and that fascinating trick, 
not altogether unconscious perhaps, of fluttering her 
nostrils. Without jealousy there was no passion and 
precious little love. And when he said, “ What brutes 
men are ” and sentenced himself to the sort of pun¬ 
ishment that ruined his peace of mind because he had 
put her into a backwater “ with her feet on a chair,” 
how great a proof he gave of his colossal ignorance 
of her and of all normal women, who, if this were the 
act of a brute, loved and respected a brute. That he 
would continue to worry himself into broken fiddle 
strings for the rest of the time was certain, and 
couldn’t be helped. If he didn’t do this he wouldn’t 
be Pelham. The daily crisis that he must continue to 
undergo bound him to her more closely and more 
fairly as a partner in this deed, and was a good train¬ 
ing for her in the future management of their baby. 
Extraordinary how little difference there is between 
a husband and a child. It would give her something 
to do while waiting, help her to occupy a mind that 
was just as lively as ever, because every day she must 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


29 


say to herself, “ Now then, what’s to be done with 
Pelham ? ” and place him here for the morning and 
there for the afternoon as a mother does with a boy 
who is away from his school and his friends. It was 
good and proper and right and astonishing and beau¬ 
tiful and it opened up wider and wider vistas of' the 
art of life and her own hitherto vaguely imagined 
responsibilities. . . . Not much more than a year ago 
she had thought of marriage either as a lark or the 
means of obtaining her freedom from parental inter¬ 
ference. From any other point of view it had seemed 
to her to be an absurdity. In those days she would 
have liked to have seen herself promising to obey any 
man. She would have liked to have put out her finger 
for a ring that meant any more to her than any old 
ring, to be lost or given away or left unworn. She 
had seen something of marriage, in her own home. 
Some of her friends had gone in for marriage, — 
elderly children with a sense of curiosity or a spirit 
of experimentalism. She had stayed with them and 
had been struck by the ephemeral manner in which it 
was treated, the indecency of it if it came to that, — 
two young people who didn’t know each other, and 
didn’t want to do so, and who both intended to cut 
the whole thing at a moment’s notice without a single 
qualm of conscience; divorce, sometimes annulment 
with a little graft and a dozen mutual lies, and then 
remarriage to other people. Without having given 
any serious consideration to the question, — it was not 
for her then to be serious, — it had seemed to her that 
a rotten state of things existed in the set to which she 
had belonged, no one caring about, or being able to 
cope with all the boys and girls who ran loose like 
wild ponies, and who thought that it was smart and 


30 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


quite the thing to plunge headlong into any adventure 
whether it led to tragedy or not. It would have been 
easy enough for any of those girls to have run off with 
half a dozen different boys at different times, on each 
occasion with the proper license in her pocket. The 
wealth of her family was all that was required to buy 
the incident off, and at the end of them all it was sim¬ 
plicity itself to wear the virginal wreath of a bride in 
one of the fashionable churches without comment. 
The curious part of it was that these young people 
bothered themselves about licenses at all, — a ludicrous 
deviation from their supreme individualism, a hypo¬ 
critical conformity to the conventions which meant 
nothing in their scheme of self-indulgence. 

And here she was, married, and facing the fulfill¬ 
ment; made over, rebuilt, altered out of all recogni¬ 
tion. And no one, not even her mother, was more 
amazed than she. 


In the room in which he had slept as a boy at the 
other end of that jolly old house of his, to which his 
grandfather and father had added and added again, 
Franklin did a little thinking that night, too, — more 
than usual. He had become an expert in thinking 
lately, a new and queer habit. The family had called 
his attention to the fact, as though he needed it called, 
that there would be no more dinners before Beatrix 
faced the ordeal. There was, everything going well, 
less than a month to endure, every hour a torture. . . . 
She had been awfully kind and gentle downstairs, 
patient and understanding. She had not pulled his leg 
for cowardice as she might have done and loved to do, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


31 


or twitted him for a sentimentality that usually bored 
her to tears. On the contrary, she had rewarded the 
confession that he had never intended to make with 
entire absolution and had let him see into the very 
sanctum of her heart in a way that had never hap¬ 
pened before. She had liked him enough to marry 
him, that was obvious. She had even been fond of 
him, with sudden moments of passion. They could 
never be forgotten. But he had never permitted him¬ 
self to dream that he really meant so much to her as 
she had told him that evening. He had no words with 
which to describe his amazement and gratitude. When 
it came to women and art he was helpless. He knew 
nothing of either. They were not in his line. He had 
really known nothing of Beatrix except her courage, 
her old intolerance, her old effrontery, her mischievous 
delight in putting herself in tight places just for the 
excitement of wriggling out. All those things had 
been easy to know. Her beauty, her charm, her unex¬ 
pected flashes of idealism and spirituality set briefly 
alight by a sunset or a great deed, he knew as well. 
But it had been a trick, a habit, with her, to hide her 
real self behind a glittering screen of quick wit, cool 
impudence, and an assumption of fleeting interest, and 
he had often been puzzled, bewildered, though never 
less in love. He had told himself frequently before 
and since marriage that a man of his kind was born 
with the sort of brain that never would be able to 
follow the naked sensitiveness, the fine pride of a girl 
like Beatrix, that he was a boob when it came to his 
knowledge of her temperament and her tangents. 
That night, for the first time, she had stripped herself 
of all the pose and affectation that she had used to hide 
a strange shyness, and the effect was like that of a sud- 


32 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


den breeze upon a sea fog. As men do, and always 
will, he had fallen in love with a young and lovely 
body, a face that had been bom in his dreams, and a 
magnetism that had drawn him out of sanity, peace 
of mind, and self-preservation. He had desired her 
with a longing so overwhelming that the very ruin of 
his life was but a small return for gratification. As 
men do when they marry, he had taken a chance, 
gambled everything blindly and eagerly, knowing as 
little of this girl’s character as her mother did, hoping 
and believing that she was all that he had idealized 
her into being, — poor devil. And now, as he walked 
up and down his room hour after hour, the fear of 
losing this precious thing was all the greater because 
he had been allowed to see into her soul, and had found 
there the simplicity, the dependence, the unselfishness, 
the loyalty, and above all the honesty with which his 
faith had invested her. And in the worst of all his 
attacks he told himself that it was no good to argue 
him into believing that there was nothing to worry 
about. Did people suppose that he’d gone through 
life with his eyes shut? There was Arthur Turner’s 
wife, no older than Beatrix, and just as fit. She 
didn't get through. She left Arthur a boy, and 
went. ... It happened every day. It made an 
infernal coward of him, and he offered no excuses. 
He simply said, “ I love this girl. Can’t you see that 
I love this girl, and that I can never prove how much 
I love her, or my gratitude for her love, unless she 
stays with me until I’m old? ” 

And then, elevated to the humbleness that brings 
men to their knees before God, he begged again that 
his wife might be allowed to stay with him. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


33 


III 

And it was in these moods and in these stages of 
emotion that Malcolm Fraser found his friend and 
the wife of his friend. 

One of those disconcertingly early birds, he was up 
and about and halfway through his day’s work before 
most people had pulled themselves together for the 
struggle. Therefore, as might have been expected, he 
drove his car up to the door of Franklin’s cottage — 
and it wasn’t a cottage any more with all its wings — 
just at the moment when the footman, minus a collar, 
was polishing the knocker. For a footman to be dis¬ 
covered without a collar is almost as tragic as for a 
girl who has bobbed her hair to be pounced upon 
before it has been rendered Hawaiian by the curling 
tongs. 

Malcolm wore a pair of large goggle-glasses with 
tortoise-shell rims, and being a poet, and a good poet, 
— there is lots of difference — he was, of course, a 
little careless in the manner of his clothes. That is 
to say, he could not be bothered to pick out a tailor 
who would do what he was told, and then devote the 
necessary time to the choice of cloth and cut, but at 
the moment when the things that he was wearing had 
become disreputable, and people had begun to talk, he 
rushed into any shop whose windows displayed gar¬ 
ments, and permitted a perfectly callous person to put 
him into a new and ludicrous suit which looked as 
though it had been borrowed from his younger 


34 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


brother. He might have been so far as anybody could 
tell, then, the representative of a firm which doctored 
invalid trees, or an insurance agent, or any one of 
those rather pathetic adventurers who endeavor to 
extract a living out of life by forcing unnecessary 
things upon innocent people. And the footman re¬ 
garded him as such, and said “ No ” abruptly before 
any question had been asked. 

It so happened that Franklin had also been up for 
hours. He had been riding hard, and came along from 
the stables just at the moment when his old pal was 
about to tell the collarless man precisely that place to 
which he was best suited. 

“ Malcolm, my dear chap! ” 

“ Pel, old son.” 

‘‘Where the devil have you sprung from? Your 
last letter was written from Paris.” 

“ I got back yesterday. I wanted to see you because 
you were writing worried things to me, and I wanted 
to see Bee before ...” 

And the two men stood and looked into each other’s 
eyes with complete understanding. One of them had 
married the girl who was loved by both, and both of 
them were in the same kind of anxiety about her, 
neither of them knowing anything of women. The 
odd part of it is that the men who do know something 
about women are generally not men. It is the law of 
compensation. 

Franklin betted that Malcolm wouldn’t ask him 
“ How is she ? ” and won. He knew how she was 
without that unnecessary question by the first glance 
at the face of the man with whom he had herded for 
years. It was very obvious to Franklin that Fraser 
had come over to stand by with that tremendous loy- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


35 


alty which was the keynote of his character, and this 
fact sent Franklin’s spirits up higher than they had 
been for several months. How good to have a pal! 

He turned to the car which was just as careless of 
its appearance as its owner. “ Where’s your luggage ? 
You’ve come to stay, of course! ” 

Fraser echoed the word luggage, slanted his head, 
and seemed to be looking all the way back to New 
York, and into his rooms on Forty-fourth Street. 
“ Isn’t it in the car? Ought to be.” 

Franklin roared with laughter. “ You complete 
idiot. You colossal fathead. You’ve left it in your 
bedroom, you’ve tilted it out into the road, or you’ve 
given it away.” 

“ I wonder,” said Fraser a little sheepishly. “ I 
have a way of doing these things I’m afraid.” 

“ All right. It doesn’t matter. I can fit you up as 
I’ve fitted you up dozens of times. Hi! Just take 
this car round to the garage.” 

But Fraser intervened quickly. “ As a matter of 
fact,” he said, “ I think I had better take her round. 
Nobody else seems to be able to say the sort of flat¬ 
tering things to her that make her start.” 

And while Franklin howled again, to the great joy 
of Beatrix who sat up in bed to listen, the bespec¬ 
tacled poet, who had the face of Ivanhoe, got in, sat 
down, assumed an expression of great tenderness, did 
one or two things with his hands, and waited mur¬ 
muring. To his own astonishment, and everybody 
else’s delight, the car functioned, and permitted herself 
to be driven round to the garage, from which he 
returned presently in triumph. “ I’m no mechanic,” 
he said gravely. “ But I do understand something 
about psychology, and kindness is always repaid.” 


36 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Upstairs in her room, out of earshot of these 
doings, Beatrix called Brownie. “ Stand on your 
head, Brownie, Pelham’s laughing and so Malcolm’s 
here.” 

To which Mrs. Lester Keene replied, as was only 
to be expected, “ I have never been taught to stand on 
my head.” Which was a pity. All women should be 
taught to stand on their heads from time to time. It 
enables them to look at life from two angles instead 
of one. 


Beatrix didn’t come down to breakfast, — not 
because she wasn’t feeling perfectly fit. She was. In 
fact she never felt better or more completely under 
mental and physical control, and, now that Pelham 
was laughing and Malcolm had come, more confident. 
A sense of shyness, and over and above that a gleam 
of imagination, kept her in her room. Dear old Mally 
had been in love with her since the time that she had 
trotted along at his side, a child, a sub-flapper, and 
eventually the girl who had come out with an imp on 
her shoulder. It did not require much intuition to 
know that the sight of her as she was would hurt this 
man terribly because, although he would follow Pel¬ 
ham headlong into hell, he loved her. And so, for 
this reason, she missed a jolly breakfast, during which 
Pelham forgot to be worried. But only temporarily. 
As soon as he found himself alone with Fraser things 
were said that can only be said by two men who had 
found each other out completely, — by camping, by 
being in mutual danger, and by having been through 
business transactions together, — the greatest of all 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


37 


tests. The end of it was that Malcolm came to the 
conclusion that not only would Pelham be better away 
from Beatrix, but that Beatrix would have greater 
peace of mind with Pelham away. In coming to this 
conclusion, he was thinking as much of Pelham as of 
Beatrix, and exercising that queer sense of fairness 
which he had always used about these two, whom he 
had in a sort of way adopted as his children. Several 
of the letters that he had received from Pelham, dur¬ 
ing the last two months, and one long letter written 
by Beatrix had made him believe that the moment 
must come when they should be separated. He had 
left Paris at a time when she was wearing her most 
beautiful dress to do this thing, and there was only 
one way in which it could be done. High explosives 
wouldn’t drive Pelham away. That was very certain. 
He would stick, stand by, and endure. Therefore, it 
was for Beatrix to send him away. He would carry 
out her wishes. 

Just for a moment after Beatrix, duly settled into 
her chair on the porch, had sent for Malcolm, he was 
hit with the idea that he might be an interfering fool, 
that his sympathy and affection were being carried too 
far. He would have withdrawn and said nothing if 
he had not remembered certain phrases in those letters, 
and the things that Pelham had said in his own room 
that morning. Once more, he told himself that he 
knew precisely what Pelham was undergoing because 
he also had moments of the most profound anxiety, 
and that under the circumstances, whatever Pelham 
might have to say, it was better for Beatrix to be left 
alone, not to have the continual worry on her shoulders 
of this terror-stricken man, undermining her own 


38 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


courage, and giving her other things to think about 
than the contemplation in peace of the coming event. 

Good God, how wrong this man was! How little 
he knew women, and how large a seed of trouble he 
planted at that moment in the Eden of his friends. 


He was allowed to go alone to see Beatrix. Pelham 
saw to that because his close association with a poet 
had given him imagination. Also because he tried to 
do for others what he would like others to do for- him. 
He told Malcolm where he might find his wife, and 
went round to the stables. It was necessary for him 
to see that Sal Gal was bandaged with a nice cool 
cabbage. 

“ My dear old Mally,” she said. 

And he took her hand and held it very tight, and 
didn’t try to speak because there was something in his 
throat. . . . Since she had been a mere kid, as devoid 
of affectation as a daffodil or a bird, he had loved her, 
—poor, damn poet, who wore goggles, and forgot his 
luggage, and put himself into reach-me-downs. 

And so she said, “ Isn’t it lovely here with every¬ 
thing just breaking out, and April over the hill at 
last. ... I knew you’d come, Mally. I’ve been wait¬ 
ing to see you. You’re staying, of course.” 

And he said, “Yes, of course. But only for a day 
or two. I’m working, my dear. Yes, I’m working, 
— I don’t mean writing poetry, although God knows 
that’s hard work enough. I have got a job. Fright¬ 
fully dull, frightfully boring, but with a charming 
man, — an Englishman who lives in Paris, and who 
wanted a secretary who could waggle the pen to help 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


39 


him to put his memoirs in order. Yes, he’s one of 
those men who leave memoirs. I ought to have begun 
by telling you that he is the Earl of Invermorach, 
former Prime Minister, the most cultivated, and the 
most illusive of all British politicians.” 

“ I don’t see why you call that boring,” said Beatrix. 
“Such a man and such a life,” — putting her hand 
on his hand. 

“ No, that was ungrateful of me.” And he didn’t 
mean it. He didn’t know what on earth he was talking 
about. He was saying these things so that he might 
not say the others that were on the tip of his tongue, 
— that he loved her, that he was jealous, that to see 
her like that in another man’s house dug his heart 
out. 

But the fact that Beatrix understood, and let him 
know that she understood, bridged over a moment that 
was very painful, and with her newly acquired tact, 
so astonishing to herself, and so amazing to every¬ 
body else, she chatted, laughed, and said things that 
made him laugh, and seemed so normal, so common¬ 
place, and above all so healthy, that emotion receded 
like the waters of a swollen river, and Malcolm recov¬ 
ered. It was then, after a long talk, that he broached 
the subject of the temporary separation, and was 
rewarded by the most incredulous laugh that he had 
ever heard from Beatrix, — and that was saying 
something. 

And so he let it go, but not before he had called her 
attention to the state of Pelham’s nerves, and told her 
that it might be wise as well as kind to send him away. 
The constant sight of her added hourly terrors to his 
life. 

To all of which he got this answer. “ Mally, you’re 


40 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


a muddled-headed old poet, and you know nothing 
about men and women. Pelham won’t leave me, and 
J won’t be left. So there it is. I’m not annoyed at 
you. I’m not even slightly irritated, because you 
mean well and are a dear and whatever you do or say 
must be forgiven because you’re the best friend we 
have. But, — say nothing more about this separation 
business. Do you understand? It isn’t going to be 
done, old Goggles. So there. And now you can run 
along and play because I want to go on reading ‘ If 
Winter Comes.’ I want to see how much longer it 
will be before Mark Sabre rides his bicycle down to 
the village, buys a woodchopper, returns home, and 
gives that terrible woman precisely what she deserves. 
If he doesn’t do this pretty soon I shall scream, and 
throw the book away.” And she held out her hand to 
Malcolm with that quite conscious royal gesture of 
hers, and gave him the sort of smile that a prima 
donna gives to a tuft hunter who has introduced him¬ 
self on the deck of a liner. He was dismissed. 

But he didn’t go immediately and hunt for his 
friend, who would be only too glad to be taken off to 
play golf. He went round the wing of the house, 
down an incline of newly-cut lawn, and into a spinney 
of young trees all peppered with their first green. 
And here he stood in amazement, half glad, half sorry, 
and told himself that the old audacious, alluring Bee 
had grown up at last, becoming, oddly enough, more 
like the little girl that he had first known than the one 
who had come out of school as cool as a fish, as 
sophisticated as a society leader of fifty, and as incap¬ 
able of grasping the fact that the earth did not revolve 
around herself as, — well, as an actor. Wonderful, 
wonderful! 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


41 


But did she look to see if poor old much-nagged 
Mark forgot to be a saint and rode up the slight 
incline that led from his .unhappy house to the village 
ironmonger’s? No, she didn’t. The book remained 
in her lap and the well-meant things that her old 
friend Mally had come to say rankled in her mind. 
It might be kind as well as wise to send her husband 
away, might it ? What did he mean by saying a dis¬ 
turbing thing like that? She had always been self¬ 
ish. She knew that. Everybody knew it. But why 
should this Malcolm man come back from Paris to 
read her a subtle lecture and take it for granted that 
she had not grown and flowered under the influence 
of love? If the constant sight of her added hourly 
terrors to Pelham’s life, he had only to say so to be 
told to go. He had confessed to terror, standing open 
to her eyes behind his shattered fourth wall, but never 
as much as by the tail of a hint had he suggested 
flight. . . . Was she still the colossal egotist, still 
the supremely selfish, spoilt girl to keep him at her 
side through a time in which she, too, had her moments 
of terror,—though she refused to let them stay? It 
would be very lonely without him, very dismal without 
the sound of his step, the thrill of his voice, the eager 
touch of his hand. And all the evenings without their 
games of cards and games of courage, and long, long 
talks would be hard to bear. “ I’m very young,” she 
said to that April morning. “ And this is my first 
baby. . . 


That night, when she had been put to bed, and Mrs. 
Keene was about to go along to her own room to in- 


42 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


dulge in her inevitable practice of placing scraps of her 
hair into a collection of strange-looking curlers, 
Beatrix stopped her. “Oh, Brownie!” she said. 
“ Will you please go down and ask Mr. Franklin to 
come and see me? Please Brownie.” This was added 
because as usual with women of her type, Mrs. Lester 
Keene was just going to say, “ Don’t you think that 
. . .” or “ Wouldn’t it be better if . . .” 

And so Brownie went down. She found Pelham 
and Malcolm in the room in which they had spent 
many good hours in the old days, smoking themselves 
into dried herrings, and talking about everything under 
the sun except women. The long, low-ceilinged room, 
lined with bookshelves, and hung with trophies of 
sport, — antlers, and heads, and mounted fish, — was 
filled with the aroma of excellent pipe mixture in which 
there was the recognizable tang of Latakia. Malcolm 
was lying full stretch on a huge settee with his hands 
under his head, and Pelham was standing with his 
back to the fireplace, erect as usual, with his long 
legs wide apart, and with the look all about him that 
goes with hard exercise and the lack of self-indulgence. 

Mrs. Keene detested tobacco, and would willingly 
have signed her name to a petition to prohibit its use, 
being one of those strange creatures who still believe, 
in the face of all proofs to the contrary, that human 
nature can be regulated by law. And so she stood 
near the door, and gave a little cough which, it is 
quite certain, would earn another mark against her 
name on the chart of the recording angel, — such 
coughs being worse to the peace and satisfaction of the 
home than raucous screams and shouted blasphemy. 

Disturbed in the middle of an argument about dry 
flies, Pelham looked up. “ Oh, hello, Brownie,’* he 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 43 

said, darting a wink at the poet. “ Come on in and 
smoke a cigarette.” 

It was wonderful to see the way in which this little 
brown woman, who had no more humor than a plate, 
and not as much sense of the ridiculous as a Toby 
jug, covered the intervening space between the door 
and the rug in front of the fireplace. Holding 
her chin very high and her head on one side, she 
walked like a turkey across a barnyard, with the flat 
footed jauntiness that belongs to those edible beasts 
who are so happy to know that they are many cuts 
above the common or garden domestic fowl. She 
illustrated in herself all that goes with what is middle- 
class everywhere. “ I don’t see how you can stand 
it,” she said with a sniff. “ Filling your lungs with 
nicotine.” 

Malcolm sprang to his feet, and made a gesture 
which asked Mrs. Keene to take possession of the 
sofa, knowing all the time that she also detested sofas 
because they were so undignified, and lead to great 
carelessness in everyday life. 

To the immense relief of both men, she delivered 
her message, coughed again, gave an individual bow, 
and turkeyed herself away. 

Out of the room almost as soon as she was, Pel¬ 
ham took the stairs like a man in seven league boots, 
and found Beatrix sitting up in bed, scented, powdered, 
and as smooth as a summer day. There were no 
lights except one in a rosy shade that hung above her 
delicious head. 

“ You want me ? ” 

“ Yes, old boy.” 

“ Anything wrong? ” 


44 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ No, nothing at all.” She motioned him to sit on 
the edge of the bed. 

But he didn’t. He went down on his knees, and 
put his lips to her arm. 

There was a funny little smile playing round her 
mouth. She had been thinking all day. Malcolm’s 
seed had taken root in her mind. Without a doubt 
it would be less selfish to send Pelham away than 
to keep him tied to apron strings. Without a doubt. 

. . . Yes, but would he go? 

“ Have you had a good day? ” she asked. 

“ Excellent,” he said. 

“ More excellent than all the days you’ve had alone 
with me ? ” 

He refused to answer so preposterous a question. 
He put his lips to her round white neck, and an¬ 
swered it. 

“ I’m not jealous of Mally,” she said. “ ‘ Friend 
that sticketh closer than a brother.’ He’s made you 
laugh again for the first time for weeks. A man needs 
a man, I know that. . . . Doesn’t he? ” 

He wasn’t listening very hard. How could he 
when she looked so frightfully nice among those 
pillows ? 

As for him, with all those eighteen months of 
tenderness and consideration and all the years ahead, 
please God, to let her prove her own, he should be 
shown whether she was selfish or not. Beatrix Van- 
derdyke, or Beatrix Franklin, — and so should Mal¬ 
colm Fraser. 

“ Where’s the Galatea? ” she asked, switching to a 
tangent. 

“ The Galatea f What on earth has put the Galatea 
into your head? ” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


4£ 


“Does that matter? I asked you where she is?” 

“ In the East River, just out of dry dock. She’s- 
just been scraped and painted. I had these things 
done while you’re like this. I thought it’d be a good 
scheme to take you aboard as soon after as possible 
for a cruise.” 

“ I shall love it,” said Beatrix. . . . “ Don’t you 
think it might be a good idea if you oiled her up by 
going for a little cruise first? ” 

“When?” 

“ To-morrow.” 

He looked at her in amazement. “ What ? Leave 
you?” 

“Why not? You must think about the Galatea” 

“ Damn the Galatea! ” 

But she didn’t laugh, much as she was tempted. He 
wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t go, do what she might to' 
persuade him. Malcolm was a poet, of course, but 
what did he know about prose? “Well,” she said,- 
keeping a perfectly straight face, “ I’ve been won¬ 
dering lately whether it wouldn’t be better for both 
of us if you went away for a bit.” 

“ It wouldn’t be better for me,” he said quickly.- 

“ Well, for me, then.” 

“Better for you!” His heart fell into his boots 
with a thud. 

“Yes,” she said. “I mean. . . . Oh, dash! It’s 
awfully difficult to put it exactly as it ought to be put. 
You see, you’re upset, and all that, and I’ve got to be 
as quiet as I can, and so forth. . . .” 

There was a long pause during which Beatrix re¬ 
peated to herself over and over again with glee and 
triumph, “ He ought to go, but he won’t, he won’t.’' 
And Pelham said inwardly, “ I’m a brute, a selfish 


46 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


brute. I’m worrying her. I'm in the way. Damn 
everything!” Finally he bent forward and kissed 
her, and said, “ I’m most awfully sorry. That’s what 
comes of marrying a man who doesn’t know anything 
about women.” He wasn’t in the least hurt. She 
had the right to send him away or keep him by her 
side, or issue any other commands that might oc¬ 
cur, being like that. He was, on the contrary, abomin¬ 
ably annoyed to think that he had been so selfish and 
so little under control as to make a nuisance of him¬ 
self, and let her see that his thoughts insisted on 
flying into a possible tragic future. “ I’ll go away 
to-morrow then, but you must swear to send for me 
when the time comes.” 

“ I swear,” she said, and she did, roundly, though 
not for him to hear. All the same Mally was wrong 
as she had betted. Pelham didn't want to go, and 
wouldn’t go under any circumstances but for the 
way in which she had put it. She had been just a little 
bit too clever. . . . Should she confess at once that 
this was the outcome of a competition with her un¬ 
selfishness, that she had put him to a sort of test as a 
sop to her vanity, and tell him that she didn’t want 
him to go in the least, and would be desperately lonely 
without him? Devil take that poet! No. Perhaps 
she had better let it go now. Pelham’s nerves were all 
over the place, and he was looking rather drawn and 
haggard from lack of sleep. It would do him good 
to get away. For his sake she would let it stand as 
it was. But he didn’t want to go, he didn’t, that was 
certain. 

So she ran her finger over his small moustache, a 
trick that she was fond of indulging in because he 
would have killed anybody else who had dared to 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


47 

attempt it. “ All right then, to-morrow, ,, she said. 
“ Take Malcolm, and ask your cousin. She’ll look 
after you, and talk a donkey’s hind leg off. You’d 
better ring her up to-morrow. She’ll adore to cancel 
all her plans and dash off at a tangent.” She put her 
arm round his neck suddenly. “ Do you want to go 
Pel?” 

“ You know I don’t.” 

“ Then why are you going? ” 

“ Because you want to me to go.” 

Yes, she had been just a little bit too clever, and 
she could keep him by raising one finger. But Mally 
should see, and she would show herself what love 
can do. 


And so, never one to let the grass grow under her 
feet, Beatrix was on the telephone early the following 
morning. Aunt Honoria, to whom she spoke first, 
considered that she had made a very wise decision. 
She, too, had come to the conclusion that Pelham, by 
wandering about the house like a turbulent spirit was 
making himself a source of worry to Beatrix, dis¬ 
turbing her peace of mind and bodily well-being. 
She thought that a short cruise on the Galatea in 
waters near enough to the shore to be in daily com¬ 
munication with his home would do him good, would 
help him to recover his confidence and balance and to 
look sanely on an event which, after all, was taking 
place every minute of the day in every part of the 
world. And then, seeing her chance to indulge in a 
little limelight, Aunt Honoria suggested that it might 
be helpful and pleasant if she came over and stayed 


48 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


with Beatrix while Pelham was away. And Beatrix 
jumped at the offer. There would be lonely evenings 
without Pelham. She must have someone to play 
with and to talk to. She wouldn’t have ventured to 
suggest the idea to Aunt Honoria because this good 
lady was one of the leading spirits in all the chari¬ 
table schemes in New York City. She not only lent 
her name to committees, but worked on them, man¬ 
aging to extract large sums of money from her 
brother for such worthy causes as the Dug-Out, sum¬ 
mer camps for poor children, and the hundred and one 
causes which are dependent in all civilizations upon 
charity. This woman who had lost the man she 
loved in her youth and remained faithful, was a born 
mother, but it was upon other women’s children that 
she was obliged to lavish her warm affections, and 
among them the dearest of all was Beatrix. 

The captain of the Galatea was the next to be called 
up, and he was informed that Mr. Franklin, Mr. Fra¬ 
ser, and a small party would be aboard that evening. 
Would he move heaven and earth to have everything 
ready for them? He would. It was perfectly simple 
looking to the fact that the yacht was only to cruise 
in home waters and supplies could be obtained daily. 
The next on the list was Franklin’s brainy cousin, 
Elizabeth, married to a man called Hector McKenzie, 
who had brought reserve and self-possession to a fine 
art, and who daily left a house on East Something 
Street of equal reserve and self-possession to sit in 
the sort of office which might have been devised by 
Lee Simonson for a Theatre Guild production, where 
he did nothing but suspend a fat gold pencil over a very 
clean writing pad, and receive financial experts from 
all parts of the world, who came armed with intro- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


49 


ductions from Kings, Governments, and Soviets, which 
led to large loans. Otherwise he did not appear to 
have anything to occupy his attention. Mrs, McKen¬ 
zie was thrilled. There was nothing she adored so 
much as suddenly to throw up all her plans, and go on 
the water, because only in a yacht was it possible to 
get away from the persistence of the telephone. Yes, 
she might certainly bring her friend, Mrs. Beamish, 
just over from the other side. She would be very 
handy as a fourth at Bridge. . . . Beamish. What did 
that name suggest but a hard-bosomed woman with 
big hips, straight, thin lips, and rimless glasses which 
pinched the top of her nose into a little nob? A candi¬ 
date for Parliament probably. Poor old Pel! 

And then, arguing herself out of a desire to cry — 
a thing which she hated to do — confirming over and 
over again her wish to believe that a little holiday would 
do Pelham all the good in the world, Beatrix pro¬ 
ceeded to get up, and go through her exercises, give 
Brownie a list of superfluous duties, and finally seat 
herself at her place at the table exactly one minute 
before Pelham and Malcolm entered the dining room 
for lunch. 

They found a smiling, capable, energetic young per¬ 
son acting hard in order to convey the impression that 
she was at peace with the world and extremely pleased 
at her efficiency and managerial capabilities. They 
were then informed of everything that had been ar¬ 
ranged and told that they must be ready to drive away 
at three o'clock to the very tick in order to be on board 
in time to welcome Elizabeth and her elderly friend 
from England. 

“ Who the deuce ? ” 


50 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ A Mrs. Beamish, Pel. But don't worry. Some¬ 
times names are amazingly misleading.” 

Pelham was unable to grumble in his beard, but his 
eyebrows met in the middle and there was anything 
but cheerful conformity round his mouth. He loved 
the Galatea. She stood for the open spaces, but he had 
no desire to see them at that time. He was being 
sent away like a naughty boy. He deserved it, but 
he hated it all the same. 

As for Malcolm, he was feeling something of the 
satisfaction of the Priest who breaks up a happy home 
with what is supposed to be the subtlety of the Jesuits 
for the personal satisfaction of doing what he calls 
“ best for everybody.” He sat with a cat-like smile on 
his face, beatific and pontifical. He congratulated 
himself upon having been the means of getting his two 
friends out of a most delicate position with great 
tactfulness. 

He had nothing to pack because he had brought 
nothing. It was arranged that he should call at his 
rooms on the way through town and get what he 
wanted. Pelham had nothing to pack because he kept 
duplicates of everything on the Galatea , — one of his 
fixed ideas being a detestation of baggage. Who said 
that money is filthy lucre? 

It was perhaps a little unfortunate that Aunt 
Honoria arrived at the moment when the car stood 
ready at the door. No out-going Prime Minister very 
much cares about seeing his place occupied by his 
successor before he has made a dignified exit. It 
rubs it in too hard. Aunt Honoria’s charming blunt¬ 
ness did something, however, to dispel this feeling. 
She said, “ I think you are very wise, Pelham. Go 
and amuse yourself. There is no reason why you 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


51 


shouldn’t. Beatrix can do her job much better with¬ 
out watching you try to do it. I’ll see that you are 
recalled at the proper time, and if ‘ willing ’ can do 
any good, you will come back to be told the three best 
words in the world, — ‘ it’s a boy And then she 
turned to Malcolm so that Pelham could say a few 
words to Beatrix. 

But it was she who spoke first, — sitting on what 
had become her place on the porch, bathed in sun¬ 
light, with books and magazines all about her, and her 
feet on a chair. “ So long, old boy,” she said lightly, 
smiling up. “ Have a good time.” 

His kiss sent the blood spinning through her veins 
and told her, better than a million feeble words, the 
story of his love and hunger and sympathy and fright. 

And like all women who are all woman, she, even 
then, with the car at the door and everything settled 
and all arguments weighed, tried to tempt him not to 
do what she had decided was right for him to do. 
She put his hand to her lips and her heart into her 
eyes. “ Do you want to go away and leave me, Pel? ” 
“ Damn everything, you know I don’t! ” 

“ Then why are you going, my darling boy? ” 

“ Because you want to me to go and I must do what 
you want.” 

Well, there it was then. She had been just a little 
bit too clever. And the blessed Malcolm had butted- 
in abominably. But all the same it was better for Pel 
and better for her to practise unselfishness for once 
and after all there was Aunt Honoria. 

For mile after mile Pel had nothing to say. He 
gave himself the worst mental thrashing of his life 
for his confounded egotism in letting Beatrix know 
how he felt about her and himself. He deserved to be 


52 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


sent away, but as to his having a good time . . . wait¬ 
ing on tenterhooks, every hour bringing nearer to 
the gate the girl whom he loved and adored. . . . 

And for a little while, all alone, with her feet on a 
chair, Beatrix brushed away a series of tears that 
would insist on running over and spoiling her make-up. 
And while she laughed at herself for these for which 
she was all responsible, plumed herself a little for 
having achieved what she considered to be the Par¬ 
nassus of unselfishness, and caught her breath at the 
realization of having to face her trouble within a 
handful of days, she allowed a bubble of disappoint¬ 
ment to enter her soul, an infinitesimal sense of 
grievance against Pelham to take possession of her 
because he had deserted her at such a time. 

“You went away, Oh, Pel, you went away!” she 
called after him in her heart. 

“ But you told me to go, you told me to go! ” she 
heard him say, utterly bewildered, poor devil. 

“ I know I did, — but you went, and you oughtn’t 
to have gone.” 


But when Aunt Honoria came round to the porch 
to talk to the girl who only a few years ago had been a 
baby, and was now, by the grace of God, to have a 
baby of her own, she found her not in tears but 
laughter at the way in which things had shaped them¬ 
selves. She had repeated to herself that this had been 
a competition in unselfishness. She knew the worst 
side of marriage, its sham and its shame, and so, play¬ 
ing up to Pelham’s standard, she had sacrificed her 
desire to keep him at her side on the altar of marriage 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


S3 


as it ought to be. Without discussion she had vowed 
with exaltation to live up to the law of give and take 
because this was not, as everybody seemed to think, 
the end but the beginning, — the delicate and difficult 
and beautiful beginning of life and the bearing of 
life, and the day by day building up in the small plain 
circle of a wedding ring an inspiration and a thanks¬ 
giving. ... 

And the woman who was childless because of a 
great love, and the girl who was to have a child for 
the same reason sat together and watched the changes 
made by long soft hours of sun and newborn hope. 

April had come over the hill. And when Pelham 
came home in May. . . . 









PART II 


I 

Even before the landing stage of the New York 
Yacht Club had faded out of sight Elizabeth Mc¬ 
Kenzie had drawn her chair into the sun on the star¬ 
board side of the Galatea. Her thick coat was not 
enough to keep out the touch of ice that was in the 
wind so she had wrapped one brown rug round her 
shoulders and another round her knees. And there she 
sat, silent for once, with a sense of pride in the river 
that gave her favorite city so dramatic a note, with a 
smile on that good-natured face of hers with its large 
mouth and large nose, twinkling gray eyes that let noth¬ 
ing escape her and eyebrows like those of a man, her 
artistic sense touched frequently by the effects of light 
and shade on the pageant of buildings, all that was 
still young in her exhilarated by the feeling of buoy¬ 
ancy that came from moving swiftly on water. She 
wore a hat in which no other American woman would 
have been seen dead, her face, as usual, utterly and 
even blatantly devoid of make-up. 

In the Colony Club there were two diametrically 
opposite opinions as to this vital and exuberant lady. 
The old-fashioned members, rigid in their worship of 
the conventions, regarded her as a pronounced freak, 
a woman who dressed deliberately out of the fashion, 
who considered herself to be brainy and who discussed 
the problems of the day with a most distressing free- 


56 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


dom, including the Freudian system of psychoanalysis, 
which she had the temerity to dismiss as quackery, 
and the question of birth control, which, if you please, 
she advocated as the only means, except wars and fam¬ 
ines, of slowing down the preposterous overcrowding 
of the world, — perfectly shocking! They sat dumb¬ 
founded while on every possible occasion she riddled 
governments with her extravagant sarcasm, tore po¬ 
litical heroes from their self-made pedestals and flung 
them back into obscurity, dealt with woman’s suffrage 
as though it were a huge farce which added further 
illiteracy to an already dangerously illiterate vote, and 
talked of religions as though they were the fetishes 
of ignorant and superstitious natives of far-off islands. 
To the younger members, by whom Elizabeth Mc¬ 
Kenzie was not yet regarded as an octogenarian al¬ 
though she was on the shady side of forty, this rather 
dear soul was looked upon as amusing and entertaining 
and different, fearless, eccentric and sometimes witty. 
They didn’t mind the fact that she had invented a sort 
of uniform, hard, neat and black and refused to appear 
in short skirts and have her hair bobbed, — fashions 
that had broken out even among matrons. Nor did 
they mind her failure to subscribe to the new vogue 
among the super-smart of appearing in the evening in 
clothes that made them look as though they had 
dressed for amateur theatricals to walk on as ladies 
of the bedchamber who belonged to the reign of 
Henry VIII. They agreed that she was an extremely 
good sport, an expert bridge player, was all in favor 
of the flapper and dead against what she called, in her 
most abrupt manner, “ frowst,” by which she meant 
that she held in great impatience and dislike every 
person and every institution, every room and every 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


57 

idea that was stuffy, that reeked of hypocrisy, that 
was hung about with outworn platitudes. The Senate, 
according to her, and the House of Commons, were 
frowsty. So were many doctors, most divines, nearly 
all the stars of the stage and some of the most high¬ 
brow of the magazines, in which the so-called intelli¬ 
gentsia ran anaemically amok and went into ecstasies 
of admiration about such egregiously stupid things as 
“ The Hairy Ape.” She was, to them, a fresh air fiend 
actually and metaphorically prepared at any moment 
to settle the great problems that had risen out of the 
chaos of peace by the letting in of air, light and com- 
monsense, — a sort of Lady Astor, though without 
either her beauty or her cheek. 

As a matter of fact, both these estimates failed in 
getting at the true character of Elizabeth McKenzie. 
She was really a very simple soul of more than aver¬ 
age intelligence and sympathy, kind, charitable and 
easily moved to emotion. Her bursts of loud laughter 
and excitement were the barricades behind which she 
hid a great sensitiveness. She had no children and 
so permitted her superabundant energy to carry her 
off into all sorts of tangents. She would have made 
a wonderful wife for a portrait painter and filled his 
studio with clients or customers, or whatever the word 
is in artistic circles. All other means failing, she 
would have picked up and carried rich women to the 
dais and the palette. Better still she would have been 
a most efficient helpmate to the manager of a circus, 
played the part of Brigadier General among the troupe, 
seen that the sad elephants were properly hosed every 
morning and the tame wild animals kept in a daily state 
of perfect hygiene. As it was, she was the wife of 
Hector McKenzie the great financier who was married 


58 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


body and soul to Wall Street; of East Something 
Street, New York, of Hillside, Huntington, Long 
Island and of Rock Edge, Bar Harbor, Maine, with 
a box at the Opera, a seat on the Committee of nearly 
every political and social Society in the City and the 
star member of the Colony Club, — an achievement 
in itself. Among other things she had a most dis¬ 
turbing way of falling desperately in love with Brit¬ 
ish lecturers, American Generals, French Scientists, 
Russian ex-aristocrats and, from a quite discreet dis¬ 
tance, with flat-nosed pugilists. And when she col¬ 
lected a number of these people together in that charm¬ 
ing room at her club which ought to have been an 
aviary she caused a thrill to run through the whole 
delightful building and hurry calls to go forth urging 
unoccupied members to turn up instantly for the fun. 

Having created a record in silence she beckoned to 
Pelham who was stalking up and down with all his 
thoughts at home and asked him to sit down. He did 
so reluctantly. Theoretically he was rather fond of 
his cousin. Actually he would any day walk ten 
miles over loose pebbles to avoid the possibility of a 
conversation. 

“ My word,” she began, “ but it’s good to be out 
here. This is the way to procure the proper sort of 
spring clean. Great idea of yours, Pelham.” 

“ Yes, but as it happens it wasn’t my idea.” Who 
could blame him for being considerably sulky under 
the circumstances. 

“ Oh, I see . . . well, although I know nothing 
about it, — it’s the only thing I don’t know anything 
about — I can well understand how unsettling it must 
be to have a loving husband knocking around the house 
before the arrival of the first baby. I congratulate 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 59 

Beatrix. She’s growing up without a doubt. Let’s 
have a look at you.” 

A most disconcerting and amazing request. Pelham 
shied at personalities like a horse at a dead cat. But 
he turned his face to her with all the courage and 
patience that he could muster and uttered a silent 
prayer that this flagrantly unself-conscious person who 
did everything for the best would get it over as quickly 
as she could. Women who said “ Let’s have a look 
at you ” were to be placed in the same category of 
avoidances as photographers. He expected and rather 
hoped for a flippant remark. Something culled from 
a comic paper in which the coming of babies is in¬ 
variably treated with the sort of snickering levity that 
makes fastidious people sick. 

He was hopelessly out of it. Elizabeth McKenzie 
was a woman of many surprises. She bent forward, 
looked deeply into his eyes and laid her hand on his 
arm. She said, “ My dear man, you’re right to let 
this thing move you as it does. There’s nothing that 
offers so great a hostage to happiness and the continu¬ 
ance of love as the deed that Beatrix is performing 
for you and herself. I talk about it as an outsider, a 
woman who is not among the lucky ones, being married 
to a financier, but I advise you to come out at night on 
the deck of this yacht of yours, achieve humbleness 
if you can and get in touch with the survivors of 
death who have had children and gone. They’ll help 
you, because they’re very kind.” 

And it was not because Pelham was any longer bored 
by the examination that he turned away but because 
strange things were happening to his cousin’s face, 
and all the pent-up longing that was in her soul and 
the intense disappointment which had followed her 


60 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


through her married, life confessed themselves too 
plainly in her emotion. 

A light laugh came over to them on the breeze. 
Malcolm Fraser had brought the McKenzie protegee 
out and was arranging her in a deck chair — an ex¬ 
cellent excuse for changing the conversation. “ What 
do you think of my latest, Pel? ” 

“ I haven’t thought,” he said. 

“ Well, I think you’d better begin. She’s worth 
it. Take a look at her now and tell me if she isn’t one 
of the most attractive girls you’ve ever seen.” 

Franklin “ took ” a look. The hard bosomed woman 
with big hips, straight thin lips and rimless glasses 
that pinched the top of her nose into a little nob, was, 
in reality, one of those tiny people who look too young 
and slight to be allowed to go out alone and who ease 
their way through life asking mutely for the protection 
not only of all rough males but of their wives and 
sisters as well. Under a small smart hat a few curls of 
bobbed hair had been artfully arranged. The profile 
with its tiny turned-up nose, sensitive mouth with 
very red lips, and a little round chin, all belonged to 
someone who did not seem to be a day older than 
seventeen. Everything about her suggested water- 
colors,—the colors of the sweet pea, elusive and deli¬ 
cate. Probably her temperament was water-colored, 
light and easily hurt, and it appeared to Pelham, al¬ 
though he was a rank amateur in the business, that she 
would be more suited to a small gold frame than out 
in life, or a conservatory carefully protected from the 
frost among equally sensitive plants. And he said, 
“ Yes, very nice.” 

Which earned one of Mrs. McKenzie’s most robust 
laughs. “ Nice! My dear man, nice isn’t the word. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


61 


It’s delicious. If I were a person of the male gender 
anywhere between eighteen and eighty that girl would 
play the devil with my entire constitution. I’d follow 
her round the world, break up a happy home, ruin a 
reputation and commit every known criminality to win 
a single kiss. I would, I swear it. She turned up in 
New York two weeks ago with a letter of introduction 
to me from Lady Risborough, who was, if you re¬ 
member, one of the Pennys of Philadelphia. Extraor¬ 
dinary, or is it extraordinary, how completely demo¬ 
cratic America has captured the aristocracy of Great 
Britain. She’s been staying with me ever since. I 
can’t let her out of my sight. It doesn’t seem either 
to be kind or wise.” 

“ Mrs. Beamish, did you say? She doesn’t look 
old enough to be married.” 

“ She isn’t. But she’s been Mrs. Valentine Beamish, 
the wife of the youngest Major in the Royal Air 
Force, since 1915, she tells me. She’s the daughter of 
an Oxford Don and an actress, — a peculiar mixture 
which must mean something. I should have thought 
by the look of her that she was the outcome of a union 
between a landscape gardener and a female harpist. 
Anyway, there she is and I’m responsible for her in 
this country. It worries me a good deal, because 
every man who has met her up to now has gone blah 
in his boots. I gather that she’s not very happy with 
the flying Valentine, although she’s never gone into 
details. She has escaped in order, probably, to recover 
her self-respect and obtain a change of scene. She has 
loads of clothes and a certain amount of fairly good 
jewelry, but not, I take it, a superabundance of cash. 
She’s always saying that she’s as poor as a church 
mouse, but, of course, that all depends on the church. 


62 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Be kind to her, won’t you, and ask Malcolm to make 
himself her big brother.” 

“ I’ll do my best,” said Pelham. “ The main thing 
is this : Does she play Bridge ? ” 

“ Like a streak.” 

“ Oh, well then.” 

And having had enough of Elizabeth McKenzie’s 
brooklike flow of words he got up to go and speak 
to the skipper. The Galatea was not the same with 
women on board. And before dinner he went ashore 
and sent off the following telegram to Beatrix. 


“ Cold wind Elizabeth talking donkey’s hind leg off Mrs. 
Beamish doesn’t live up to her name and plays bridge like 
a streak all my love.” 


II 

And when this was read to Beatrix over the tele¬ 
phone by an operator who looked upon politeness as 
undemocratic and translated streak into steak, having 
been prevented, probably, from getting away to her 
evening meal, Aunt Honoria saw so introspective an 
expression on her niece’s face that she ventured to ask 
if anything was the matter. 

“ Mrs. Beamish,” replied Beatrix, “ is a young and 
pretty woman.” 

“ And who, pray, is Mrs. Beamish and why shouldn’t 
she be young and pretty? ” 

Before replying to these questions Beatrix walked 
slowly to the other end of the long low-ceilinged draw- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


63 


ing-room, of which, since she had weeded out of it a 
number of the clashing pieces of furniture collected by 
Pelham’s indiscriminate forbears, she had grown ex¬ 
tremely fond. Her untrained though naturally artistic 
eye had immediately been hurt by the close juxtaposi¬ 
tion of fine old Colonial bits with florid things of the 
Empire period; of family portraits in oils with the 
airy and somewhat indiscreet pictures of the early 
French school to which grandfather Franklin had 
fallen victim. All these had been removed to the vari¬ 
ous guest rooms leaving the drawing-room with the 
charming and dignified air that belonged to the time 
of Washington in which the aristocratic Aunt Honoria 
with her white hair and high-bridged nose and unpur- 
chasable simplicity made another appropriate picture. 

“ Mrs. Beamish,” added Beatrix, returning, “ has 
been taken on the Galatea by Elizabeth McKenzie and 
is going to help Pel to forget about me. Am I jeal¬ 
ous? Ask me that. I can see it on the tip of your 
tongue.” 

“ Always willing to oblige, my dear. Are you? ” 

With Pelham absent and Malcolm Fraser away and 
only the elderly lady present, Beatrix was glad to walk 
about for a change. With the proper vanity of young 
women in that circumstance she was very reluctant to 
be seen at a disadvantage by all male persons. “ I 
don’t know,” she replied, perfectly frankly. “Just for 
a second or so I believe I was, and it had the astonish¬ 
ing and I suppose rather good effect of bringing me 
to earth from the pedestal on which Pel and you and 
mother and father have perched me since I began to 
play the game. In a sort of mental still I could see a 
frightfully pretty girl making hay with Pelham and 
applying sympathy to his present mood. Any fright- 


64 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


fully pretty girl would seize the chance. There is no 
loyalty among women. Not as much as there is among 
opera singers. And I kicked myself for being so care¬ 
less as not to have found out all details of Elizabeth’s 
latest adoption before I agreed to let her go aboard. 
But on the way back from the other end of the room 
my knowledge of Pel made me thoroughly ashamed of 
the feeling, and now Pm as right as rain.” And she 
hummed a little tune to prove it. 

Aunt Honoria had known Pelham all his life. She 
had seen him break from a clean-eyed boy into a 
healthy-minded adolescence and go in for exercise and 
bodily development. She had wondered a little at his 
love of disappearing from the haunts of the ultra-civil¬ 
ized men to which he belonged to devote himself to big 
game hunting. He must have thrown back to an 
ancestor of pre-Mayflower days. His father, grand¬ 
father and great-grandfather had been, she knew, 
rather given to a fondness for the flesh-pots in the 
intervals of the business which had prospered so amaz¬ 
ingly as to put them among the original millionaires 
of America. His grandfather especially had been a 
very gay dog. But she was no sceptic, and had a great 
belief in human nature. She believed especially in 
Pelham Franklin and placed him among those men 
who had not done without the society of women 
because they were misogynists but because they were 
idealists; men who having, as boys, built up a dream 
of the -perfect woman stored it away like a precious 
thing and found no interest in imitations, — were 
able, luckily, to be faithful to their ideal and play a 
waiting game. Most women, even without scepticism, 
would not have carried their respect for men or their 
lack of sex vanity so far. They would have told them- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


65 


selves sympathetically that a good-looking, most eligible 
man like Franklin could have held to his ideal while 
he consoled himself with the nearest approach to it. 
But Aunt Honoria had retained her own idealism and 
never read French and, therefore, she was quite sure 
that Franklin, although married, was to be trusted out 
of sight of his wife during this very difficult period 
of his life, even in the company of a young and pretty 
woman who was without loyalty to her sex. There 
were other men, as she had said, who would have 
slipped off, deliberately, at a tangent, during this time, 
being dishonest and without self-restraint. In which 
case, Beatrix would have had every reason, married 
to one of them, to feel jealous. She banked on Pel¬ 
ham and said so, and won an enthusiastic kiss for so 
doing. 

Whereupon, all being well, Beatrix sat down to 
play “ Canfield.” She missed the good smell of 
Pelham’s pipe tobacco more than she thought it sport¬ 
ing to admit. He had never been away from her 
before. Aunt Honoria dallied with an illustrated 
monthly, the advertising pages of which were filled 
with the alluring drawings of many of the European 
hotels that she knew so well. And they made a 
charming picture of evening content, these two, shar¬ 
ing the comfortable warmth of a log fire and the well- 
shaded light of two reading lamps; Aunt Honoria 
almost the last of the women who maintained a 
straight back while sitting with no unhappy exposure 
of leg, and yet succeeded in conveying the impression 
that she was at perfect ease and at the same time ready 
to meet any emergency without the scampered re¬ 
arrangement of attitude that goes with this very care¬ 
less period when women have discarded tradition with 


66 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


their corsets and imagine that by burying their noses 
in powder they have hidden the remainder of their 
ungracefulness. And after ten minutes of the sort of 
equable silence that can only exist when people are on 
the most understanding terms Beatrix burst out 
laughing. 

“ What do you find so funny, my dear? ” 

“ Myself,” said Beatrix. “If anyone had prophe¬ 
sied, eighteen months ago, that I should ever have been 
found playing this futile little game I should have 
been perfectly certain that he was qualifying for a 
lunatic asylum.” 

“ So should I,” said Aunt Honoria. 

“ All the same, as it turns out, he would have been 
a man with more knowledge of the possibilities of the 
flapper than most, wouldn’t he? ” 

“ Yes, in your case, — as it turns out. But then, as 
I always said, you had only to fall in love with the 
right man to become a credit to the family.” And 
having stated this with that air of finality which goes 
with everyone whose prognostication on any subject 
has come true by accident, Aunt Honoria returned to 
her magazine. 

Beatrix had, however, dined well. She was, more¬ 
over, doing well. In addition to which she was no 
longer in the position, being married and being hostess, 
to accept her very definite Aunt’s dictums as though 
they were gospel. She could argue with her now, 
feeling delightfully on the same level, and, for the 
sheer joy of getting even with many a forced and 
apparently respectful silence, she jolly well would. 

She put down an ace and drew in a long breath. 
“ I know that you always said that, Aunt Honoria,” 
she began, “but — ” and what a tremendous step it 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


67 


marked in her career to be able to add that word — “I 
don’t think I’ve become a credit to the family by just 
falling in love. Sooner or later I should have become 
a credit to the family anyhow.” 

It was thrilling to see in the elder woman’s enquir¬ 
ing look not the old astonishment but a new deference, 
— of all women this one. 

“ The flapper is a much misunderstood animal,” 
continued Beatrix, hiding her triumph and enjoyment 
behind an air that was just sufficiently casual. “ I 
can see that now, looking back. She’s made of exactly 
the same stuff as the flappers of every other period but 
she does openly what they did behind a hedge of hum¬ 
bug. She discarded deceit with her petticoat and from 
the day that she openly declared herself the possessor 
of a pair of legs scrapped all the old conventions.” 

“ She did indeed! ” said Aunt Honoria. 

“ It was a frightful blow to early Victorianism but 
it marked the declaration of independence on the part 
of every sound girl. Like all revolutionaries we car¬ 
ried things a bit to extremes, of course. We made 
parental discipline a farce, I own, but that was because 
parental discipline had proved itself to be unhealthy 
and retrogressive. When we asked, ‘ why ’ to all the 
‘ don’ts ’ that were thrown at us, the only answer we 
got was ‘ Because I say so ’, and that wasn’t wise and 
it wasn’t logic. We had ceased to believe that parents 
were infallible and were determined to buy our own 
experience. Rather an expensive hobby in many cases, 
perhaps, but one that had suddenly become the fashion. 
We believed ourselves to be women of the world at 
sixteen and having no mysteries to discover wasted no 
time lurking in dark corners, peering at life through 
a keyhole. Out we went into the open, fearless and 


68 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


sophisticated, on equal terms with men. The modern 
debutante who has been so much rotted by novelists 
and newspaper people has really done more to improve 
the world than all the suffrage stuff piled into a heap. 
Her honesty and wide-eyedness and her utter contempt 
of simpering sentimentality have given her the finest 
sort of protection and this has reacted in a wonderful 
way on all the boys who help her to make things hum. 
They are sounder and more healthy too, which, believe 
me, is something to have achieved. As for me, coming 
back to that, I was on the very verge, when I met 
Pelham, of putting on the brakes and running in 
conformity to law and order. I might still be a spin¬ 
ster if I hadn’t fallen in love with him and I shouldn’t 
be playing solitaire now, or acting as your hostess, but 
flapperism would have worn itself out as it always does 
and I should have become a perfectly amenable though 
a rather tired young woman, ready and willing to 
settle down and become the mother of the future.” 

Aunt Honoria gave a little bow. She had been 
gifted with a sufficient sense of humor to appreciate 
her niece’s delight in making this daring contradiction, 
and was thankful for the reason that enabled her to 
do so. Inwardly, however, she refused to accept this 
justification of the flapper, who was to her, and would 
always be, an unruly young vulgarian, an anarchist 
and one who stood very badly in need of corporal 
punishment. The very early Victorianism that made 
it impossible for her to agree with Beatrix made it 
equally impossible to argue the point with her as 
hostess. The period to which she clung had as many 
good as it had bad points. Indeed, to those old enough 
to make a comparison between post-war civilization 
and that complacent though much satirized time with 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


69 


its ignorance of the telephone and the motor car, its 
false hustle and sensational press, its moving pictures 
and its radiophone, its victrola and its jazz, its good 
points far exceeded its bad ones. Then, at any rate, 
there had been respect for elders and general good 
breeding, dignity and elbow-room, a lack of noise and 
feverish amusement-seeking, a heavy but respectable 
press and a pleasant smugness and conformity to con¬ 
vention which made for solidity, whiskers and family 
vaults. And then, too, it was the habit to breed great 
men in art, letters and politics which has to-day gone 
completely out of fashion, perhaps because of the 
present desire to avoid apprenticeship, the sleepless 
nights and the laborious days and start at the top of 
the ladder without having taken the trouble to mount 
it rung by rung. There is, in consequence, an ever- 
lengthening list of tin-pot gods and exploded pigmies. 

All this Aunt Honoria merely thought, smiling. 
And while Beatrix, smiling too, continued her game 
of Canfield, better called Patience, the elder lady left 
the beginning and the end of her magazine to run 
lightly through its least important part, the middle, 
and a pleasant silence prevailed in that charming room 
again. The chair in which Pelham sat after dinner 
with his long legs stuck out, the inevitable pipe between 
his teeth and a book about birds or beasts on his read¬ 
ing stand, was conspicuously empty, but there was a 
wonderful and mysterious sense of another live thing 
with Beatrix, — tiny movements and impatiences. . . . 


70 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


III 

The wind was still cold. Mrs. Beamish announced, 
nevertheless, that she was going to take a walk on deck 
before turning in. Was anyone inclined to join her? 
No one was. She asked this question with her eyes on 
Pelham. What could he do, therefore, but get up, help 
her into her coat and lead the way out, leaving Mal¬ 
colm, who had merely unfolded his legs, to settle down 
again, start a fresh cigar and put the cards away? 

“ Women on yachts,” said Pelham inwardly, receiv¬ 
ing a southwest buffet in the face for his impertinence. 

The sky was clear and as filled with lights as a great 
city seen from an aeroplane. In a yacht club on the 
shore near by a dance was going on and Zuluesque 
music was blowing over the intervening water. A new 
moon looked like the delicate eyebrow of a child. And 
for half an hour these two walked up and down on 
the port side. 

Pelham had killed the evening pretty well. Every¬ 
one had played good Bridge and the cards had been 
sportingly divided. Mrs. McKenzie had talked rather 
less than usual, having been continually sat upon, and 
Mrs. Beamish had proved herself to be not only an 
expert but one of those rare women who did not 
indulge in the incessant back chat which generally goes 
with feminine play, to the utter destruction of concen¬ 
tration. At that very moment, he knew, Beatrix, 
having been talked into bed by Brownie, was sitting 
up among a pile of pillows under her little pink lamp 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


71 


waiting for Mark Sabre to return from the village on 
his old bicycle with a chopper. Aunt Honoria had, of 
course, prevented her from getting any further into the 
book since he had left home, a week ago as it seemed 
already. He owed one to Malcolm for that. How 
absurd it was to suppose that he would be less anxious 
away from Beatrix than with her. The point that he 
must rub in had nothing to do with self, however. He 
had made himself a nuisance and been got rid of. 
Serve him jolly well right. For all that it was his 
privilege to curse because he had been removed and 
thank Heaven that Malcolm had had the imagination 
to see that his removal would take away from Beatrix 
all chance of catching the infection of his terror. So 
there it was. All the same he had made no promise to 
anyone not to be beastly disagreeable, there was some 
satisfaction in that. He intended to make Malcolm 
wish that he had remained in Paris and both the 
women fervently sorry that they had ever set foot on 
the Galatea. What was the use of being a man and 
not being human? 

“ I beg your pardon? ” 

With an air of patience that Mrs. Beamish had 
never supposed herself to be capable of, she repeated 
her remark. She had been talking incessantly, and 
rather well, during the whole of that curious half an 
hour, saying nice things about the sky and the stars, 
the view, the intermittent sound of music, the clean¬ 
ness of the breeze, the beauty of the yacht, and had 
paused in her latest outburst of ecstasy, so natural, 
so naive and so spontaneous, and waited once more for 
some sort of answer from the tall, wiry, distrait man 
who had so much money and was still delightfully 
young and whose wife was living through a period 


72 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


that was very trying to a husband, — a man who had 
looked at her hitherto with eyes that failed to focus. 
Perfectly reasonable, but judging from former experi¬ 
ences, not likely to last very much longer, — unless 
she had completely lost her touch. 

“ Is that so,” replied Pelham, who ought to have 
said, “ Yes, indeed,” if he had been listening. But 
with enormous strides and a cap pulled down over his 
nose he was in reality covering the floor of the bed¬ 
room at home, admiring the effect of the light on 
Beatrix’s delicious fair hair. 

“ I have never been on a yacht like yours before. 
It’s rather like a young liner, isn’t it? How wonder¬ 
ful to have money and know how to spend it.” She 
heaved one of those poverty sighs which had eased 
the pressure of things most satisfactorily on other 
occasions, and was obliged almost to run to keep up 
with him. 

“ I don’t think it’ll last,” said Pelham, taking a 
chance at her talking about the weather. Most women 
did. If the baby was a boy, and Beatrix got over it, 
he’d knock off smoking by about a dozen pipes a day 
by way of thanksgiving. A man could hardly do 
more. 

Having been brought up on a good golf links, Mrs. 
Beamish preferred things to be a little difficult and 
even liked undoubted rough in its proper place. She 
was not one of those occasional players who resented 
bunkers, either. She was very able with a niblick. 
But this was hardly golf. “ It was a deadly dull 
crossing,” she went on, nevertheless, although con¬ 
siderably out of breath. “ I was all alone, you see. 
There were stacks of men coming over to enquire into 
conditions, but they looked like it and prepared for 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


73 


prohibition, which luckily kept them out of sight. I 
don’t like women. One can be as lonely on a crowded 
Aquitania as on Fifth Avenue, or the middle of 
Piccadilly. But, after all, I suppose, it’s a moral tonic 
to be completely and absolutely unhappy once in a way. 
Don’t you think so? ” 

But even that didn’t work. This man said “ Yes ” 
when he should have said “ No,” and “ Is that so? ” 
when he should have said “ I don’t agree with you,” 
and he raced up and down, consistently profile, with 
his hands buried in his pockets and a brain which 
should have become susceptible to a very charming 
young woman who had worked extremely hard alto¬ 
gether in the possession of a wife who was no use to 
him under the circumstances. It was quite, yes, quite, 
unbelievable. And so she fell out and leaned on the 
rail, achieving an attitude of forlornness which few 
artists could have arranged so perfectly. 

And after Pelham had passed and re-passed a dozen 
times in the belief that she was still trotting pluckily 
at his heels, the Lord only knew why, and she heard 
him continue to say “ yes ” and “ no ” and “ is that 
so ” because that was what was apparently required 
of him, a sense of humor came to her rescue as it 
usually did. She burst out laughing, gave it all up 
for the time being and went in to the now deserted 
smoking room. Her kind and trusting bear leader 
had gone to bed. And so, obviously, had Malcolm 
Fraser, who meant nothing in her young life, being a 
poor poet. And here, protected from the wind that 
she detested and the faint but persistent band which 
made sounds that were as far from being melody as 
an attack on an iron-monger’s shop by a band of hooli- 


74 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


gans, she lighted a cigarette and lay full stretch on the 
settee, exposing a yard of very charming leg. 


When Elizabeth McKenzie told Pelham that her 
protegee was the daughter of an Oxford Don and an 
actress she was not strictly accurate. She was always 
several degrees from due North. May Beamish was, 
as a matter of fact, the youngest of the nine children 
of the Rev. Almeric Spencer Chesham, Rector of a 
little place sixteen miles from Oxford, and of his wife 
Lillith, a once beautiful but inveterately lazy and “ Oh, 
I can’t be bothered ” woman. Hence this overwhelm¬ 
ing family and the subsequent crushing poverty of the 
poor man whose devotion to the Church had been 
daily undermined by the spectre of the butcher’s bill. 
Like all such women Mrs. Chesham laid down the 
blame for her disproportionate family to providence 
instead of to improvidence, and posed so often as one 
of the few remaining specimens of the perfect mother 
woman that she grew to believe it herself. In so far 
as that went, therefore, she was an actress, but in no 
other way. To the most sympathetic and child-loving 
person it will be easy then to understand that little 
May, the last and smallest of this brood, found her 
parents too poor and too blase to give her more atten¬ 
tion than was legally required. She came through her 
infancy with so tenacious a grip on life that all neglect 
was overcome. Death, who came within an ace of 
claiming her a dozen times, eventually gave her up in 
despair. At the fag end of this harum-scarum family 
the poor little thing was like the battered bow at the 
tail of a kite. From childhood she inherited the gar- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


75 


ments which had descended through four sisters from 
the eldest. In the general scramble for food she, like 
a small pig, remained on the outside until everything 
had gone but the bones, overlooked, undernourished, 
and regarded by the whole family as unintended, her 
struggle to remain alive was beautiful in its courage 
and optimism and quite extraordinary in its humor. 
Born in May, and so named, there was much in her 
character that belonged to that intrepid month. She 
insisted on growing up and making a place for herself, 
and all the while she invested her broken toys and 
fifth-hand clothes with the perfection of a strong 
imagination, as a gutter-snipe turns a park pond into 
the sea. Before she was old enough to be let out alone 
she tramped several miles daily to a cheap and insalu¬ 
brious school, frequently winning a ride back in a 
baker’s cart on her reputation for neglect. Tiny 
though she was and remained she developed the 
physique of a ballet dancer and the cold grit of a tight¬ 
rope walker, and when, at seventeen, with the capacity, 
created by a long apprenticeship to adversity, to make 
a gleam of sunshine into a fine day she was taken to 
London as companion to an aunt. She said goodbye 
to the almost bankrupt rectory with the determination 
to make someone bring her dreams of great affluence 
into actuality. Her story of mended skirts and patched 
stockings, an attic bedroom and broken toys, must be 
changed into one of silks and diamonds by the sale of 
her face. This, her only asset, had become irresistibly 
pretty in a flower-like way, and it was admirably 
enhanced by a charming and perfectly balanced little 
body. In the tidy, efficient care of her father’s 
widowed sister, who had been left a house in an almost 
fashionable part of London with sufficient money to 


76 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


keep it up by the exercise of much ingenuity in the 
dodging of income tax, the Cinderella of Little Bed- 
dington turned herself into a personality. Her hair 
was bobbed, her freckles were removed, her nails were 
manicured. The summer sales provided her with what 
was indeed a magic wardrobe and for the first time in 
her life she slept in linen sheets. In return for all 
these benefits she made companionship a fine art and 
proved to an often disillusioned aunt that gratitude 
still existed. The hardy weed of the rectory garden 
blossomed into a very perfect specimen of the sweet 
pea. 

Then came the war, which released the four 
Chesham boys from their office stools and sent them 
rejoicing into the open. To them, as to so many 
thousands of their class who were prevented by the 
poverty of their parents from making a profession of 
the Army or the Navy, the great catastrophe was a 
godsend. They took to uniforms like ducks to water 
and became good officers in the twinkling of an eye. 
Most of them paid a high price for their joy in death 
and wounds, and in the winnowing of youth Charlie 
Chesham and Dick went down. Harry lost his left 
arm and Almeric both eyes. Of the five girls two 
were married, with children, and their husbands ob¬ 
tained cushy jobs in Whitehall by pulling strings. 
Two others went as soon as it was possible into the 
Motor Service and greatly distinguished themselves. 
May was too young and too small to pass through the 
barriers of red tape and remained with her aunt. It 
so happened that among the boys who had begun to 
flutter round her like moths about a candle was Val¬ 
entine Beamish, and it was at him rather than at any 
of the others that May had been shooting her most 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


77 


seductive eyes. He was not so good-looking as 
Nicholas Ingraham or that brilliant young barrister 
Reggie Barlow who had sworn to achieve the wool¬ 
sack and inevitably would have done so, being un¬ 
scrupulous, but for the German bullet that bore his 
name. But his father was then a rich man, owner of 
the B. B. Steamship Company, whose fleet carried 
merchandise to every port of the world, and Valentine, 
for all that his nose was crooked, would be able to 
compensate for seventeen years of that hugger-mugger 
rectory, that swarm of brothers and sisters, the flat- 
tened-out clergyman who regretted that he had not 
become a priest and the hairpin-dropping mother who 
had spent her life in lying about the house and going 
from one accidental event to another with the regu¬ 
larity of the seasons. Very young before the war, 
Valentine had entertained no wild ideas of early mar¬ 
riage and merely included the pretty May among the 
many girls to be flirted with. He had been commis¬ 
sioned in the Royal Naval Air Service, had picked up 
his job as best he could, flown an antiquated bus at 
Gallipoli, and spent the inevitable period in hospital 
being put together again for further exploits. Dur¬ 
ing his convalescence he had stayed with the aunt in 
Rutland Gate, received the mixture of adoration and 
captivation from the most unusual girl whom he had 
never been able to kiss, caught the deadly cocci of 
khaki ecstasy that had led to so many hasty and mis¬ 
taken marriages and carried May off to St. Mary 
Abbot’s in a taxicab two days before he reported for 
service again. 

For several months the well-satisfied bride beamed 
upon her friends. Yes, thank you. Her husband was 
the son of the B.B.S.C. of which everybody knew. 


78 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


As soon as the silly old war was over she was going 
to look at houses in Grosvenor Square and spend all 
her afternoons in and about Bond Street getting, oh 
my dear, such heavenly things to wear. She was 
going to buy one of the really old places in the coun¬ 
try, hunt, race, collect china and prints and eventually 
see to it that her esteemed father-in-law, whom she 
had never met, bought a peerage from the ever-oblig¬ 
ing Government so that, in the natural course of 
things, she would be addressed as her Ladyship by 
first, second and third footmen in the manner of the 
green-eyed coral-haired sirens in the naive works of 
Elinor Glyn, upon which she had built up so many of 
her adolescent dreams. But the war — which de¬ 
stroyed so many reputations, upset so many calcula¬ 
tions, and revolutionized all old shibboleths put a 
rough foot upon her perfectly natural reaction from 
poverty and neglect. Those of the ships of the 
B.B.S.C. that were not caught in the enemy ports and 
sunk by enemy submarines became rusty and barnacle- 
covered wherever they were permitted to lie by the 
much worried Admiralty, with the result that Papa 
Beamish went headlong into bankruptcy and Valen¬ 
tine, with nothing but his pay, stood perpetually over¬ 
drawn at Cox’s Bank, which grew fat and autocratic 
on the war. And for five long and dreadful years 
May, among the wreckage of her dreams, continued 
to companion a nerve-shaken aunt whose income 
dwindled steadily as taxation and the cost of living 
mounted higher and higher. Faced with unemploy¬ 
ment and empty pockets whenever he got out of uni¬ 
form, the gallant Valentine, who had become before 
the Armistice a Major in the R.F.C. with a double 
row of ribbons on his much-improved chest, re- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


79 


mained in the service and was used by a more and 
more bewildered and blundering Government in the 
various places in which to oblige the ubiquitous Mr. 
Churchill they maintained an army, and found him¬ 
self in 1922 in a one-eyed spot in Ulster, watching the 
inevitable family squabble of the advertising Irish 
who, having terrorized Mr. Lloyd George into giving 
them all that they demanded were proceeding with the 
utmost satisfaction to reduce their once prosperous 
country to ruin and chaos. And then, during the brief 
and glorious heat-wave of the spring, the patriotic 
Aunt Augusta wrote her weekly letter to the editor of 
the Post and went off in a fit of anger and humiliation 
to a well-deserved rest. She was buried in the weed- 
covered churchyard at Little Beddington by her sor¬ 
rowful and affectionate niece within a stone’s throw of 
the modest slab beneath which reposed the earthly 
remains of The Rev. Almeric Spencer Chesham and 
Lillith, his can’t-be-bothered spouse. The former had 
died of intense regret and the latter without a struggle, 
and after the rapacious Government had helped itself 
copiously to Aunt Augusta’s leavings May became 
possessed of fifteen hundred pounds. Still looking 
seventeen in a favorable light and clever make-up, 
May had, by this time, achieved the ripe old age of 
twenty-six. The persistent optimism and the sense 
of humor acquired during her Rectory years had 
brought this girl successfully through the crisis of the 
war and her unproductive marriage. But with the 
harborage of the house in Rutland Gate no longer hers 
to enjoy and the duty of companionship no longer hers 
to perform, something had to be done. 

Examining herself carefully in the glass, May came 
to the conclusion that she could do better for herself 


80 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


than live with the lights turned down on half the pay 
of a Flying Corps Major, which might cease at 
any moment. She must join the enormous ranks 
of working women and endeavor with her small 
nest egg, to insure a silk-lined future. At twenty-six 
there was little time to lose. And so, after an expen¬ 
sive rest cure at the Metropole Hotel of exactly one 
week, she wrote a long, cool, kind and practical letter 
to the husband whom she had rarely seen, asked him 
to be ready to provide her with a divorce upon receipt 
of a cable and announced her intention of sailing to 
America. 

“ ’Twill be better for us both, dear boy,” she wrote. 
“ Through no fault of yours our marriage has failed, 
and if I can wangle an engagement that will give me 
all I want, at last you will be free to spend whatever 
you can earn all upon yourself. I feel the need more 
and more of becoming very expensive and I hate to 
think of putting you further into debt. And when the 
War Office bungs you a chit to say that your services 
are no longer required I don’t want to be a load on 
your shoulders while you grub along until the next 
war. All I hope is that you won’t have to rattle a 
box in Cockspur Street. If I have any luck it goes 
without saying that you can touch me for a bit. All 
the gold of the world is in America and as divorce is 
the national habit and married men are very suscep¬ 
tible to my unusual type I don’t think I shall be adven¬ 
turing very long. I am off on the Aquitania next 
week and will write a chatty note from time to time. 
Goodbye, dear boy. Here’s all the luck in the world 
from your affectionate and grateful Kitten.” 

She wrote this frankly and without reserve because 
she knew, better than anyone, that Valentine, rackety 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


81 


as he was when he got the chance, was absolutely trust¬ 
worthy. He was, indeed, a man for whose reckless 
bravery and sportsmanship she had a great respect. 
She was proud of him, too, and but for the collapse of 
his father’s business would have made him a good little 
wife. But all her sixteen early years demanded com¬ 
pensation, and the longer such compensation was de¬ 
layed the greater became her obsession to achieve it. 
It had become a fixed idea. It amounted almost to 
fanaticism, like the desire to discover the North Pole 
or communicate with Mars. She told herself that she 
had earned the right to something more than comfort 
and she was ready, with all the grit, courage and 
humor that she had been forced to acquire, to achieve 
her ambition, by hook or by crook. 

Hence, having learned all about Pelham from her 
new friend, her presence on the Galatea. 

Poor old Pelham! 


IV 

But it was not until the third day out, when Mal¬ 
colm and Mrs. McKenzie had gone ashore, that May 
Beamish made any headway in her scheme to catch 
this temporarily wifeless man on the rebound, — gen¬ 
erally an easy thing to any young woman with a pretty 
face and neat ankles. All in white but with a geranium 
tie and stockings she took possession of Pelham’s 
favorite chair in the sun forward and waited for him 
to come along to sleep. And, when he came, she rose 
with a little cry of fright, certain that he would be 


82 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


shamed into asking her to stay where she was, but 
quite uncertain as to whether he would be sufficiently 
unpossessed of Beatrix for once to draw a chair to her 
side. Whether the geranium tie and stockings had 
anything to do with it or whether they hadn’t is open 
to argument. The fact remained that Pelham fell to 
her trick and drew up a chair. Excellent. 

“ You must be lonely,” he said, suffering severely 
from that complaint. 

She smiled to convey the idea that that was nothing 
new and touched his arm with the tip of a finger. 
“ I’m awfully sorry,” she said simply, “ and I quite 
understand,” and then immediately became imper¬ 
sonal, almost like a man. But she could see that she 
had touched the vox humana stop of the Pelham in¬ 
strument for the first time and warmed to further 
work. Here was a man who was as young as and even 
younger in regard to women than the pre-war Nicholas 
Ingraham and all the other boys who had come to 
the house in Rutland Gate. Little crosses in France 
marked most of their places now. For several min¬ 
utes she talked quietly, using unexuberant words, 
about wind and weather, Malcolm Fraser and the dear 
good lady who had been so kind. But she crossed her 
legs in a way that permitted the unconscious display 
of a small round knee, one of the neatest things that 
she did. 

Sulking was not one of Pelham’s characteristics. 
He had forced himself into an attitude of aloofness 
out of loyalty to his wife and as a sort of punishment 
for his unrestraint at home. Four days on the water 
with only a mental picture of the precious girl with her 
feet on a chair had steadied his nerves. From the 
perspective of the Galatea the act of having a baby 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


83 


seemed far less disastrous and original, and Aunt 
Honoria’s daily reports over the telephone which he 
dashed ashore to receive had sent him back increasingly 
normal and confident. Then, too, the sun was warmer 
and the ice had gone out of the wind. There was 
color on the earth once more. The man who says 
that weather makes no difference to his life doesn’t 
know what living is. He had been monosyllabic and 
ungracious to his cousin and her friend. Dash it, he 
must begin to make up for his bad behavior, espe¬ 
cially to the friend. He must remember that her 
bridge had been good, her manner deliciously quiet, 
her occasional laughter musical, her demands for 
attention nil. And now she showed herself, with a 
nice economy of words, to be possessed of the sympa¬ 
thy that he needed and the understanding that made 
apology unnecessary. The knee was charming too. 
Come. It was not such a bad old world. 

And so he loaded a pipe and talked with the sun on 
his face. And for a very pleasant hour she let him 
talk, drawing him out on what she had taken the 
trouble to discover were his pet subjects and leading 
him to believe, by warm eyes and little bursts of mirth, 
that he was talking well. Then, finally, when she had 
made him feel completely at home with her and ex¬ 
tremely pleased with himself, she led him gently into 
personalities and lied about her life. Or rather she 
roughed out her story with so cunning a touch of 
romance that she made him see that she was in reality 
far‘more in need of sympathy than he had ever been, 
which helped him to his feet. Convalescence is always 
easier when an invalid is shown that a fellow sufferer 
has been nearer to death than himself. 

She gave him to understand, though with none of 


84 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


the slimy spirit of martyrdom, that she had slipped 
into an unfortunate marriage after a most unhappy 
childhood. She painted an amusing though undelec- 
table picture of the Rectory and its inmates, of her 
rescue by the Aunt, of the London house and its boys, 
of the bombshell of the war and her visit to the Church. 
She made out that under such conditions, at seven¬ 
teen, a patriotic girl, too young to serve, could do no 
less than give herself to a gallant flying man as a 
contribution to the cause. And when she came to 
grass-widowhood, the death of her protector, and her 
recent ejection from the safety of Rutland Gate to the 
draughtiness of the wide, wide world, her choice of 
colors was very deft and she left the ineffaceable 
impression of herself as an almost innocent child- 
wife, deserted by a brave but pre-occupied husband, 
at the mercy of Fate. “ And but for dear Mrs. Mc¬ 
Kenzie,’’ she said, bringing her story to the end of its 
current instalment with a smile on her trembling lips, 
“ I haven’t a friend on earth.” 

“ There you’re wrong,” said Pelham, as she knew 
that he would. “ You have a friend in me.” 

After which it didn’t matter in the very least that 
the others returned to the yacht. 


V 

But when, at the end of another week, this little 
working girl read over the careful entries in her 
secretly written diary, there was very little in them 
to build great hopes upon. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


85 


Through them all there ran a note of astonishment 
and failure. Was there ever such a man? “I stood 
close to him on deck to-night with the moonlight in 
my hair. We had been alone for an hour and I had 
never talked so well. But when I had brought every¬ 
thing up and up to the moment which in a dozen other 
episodes always ended with a kiss, — midnight, a 
multitude of stars, a sailing moon, the rattle of sex — 
he swung into a story of a tiger hunt and then said 
‘ time for bed/ ” 

And another. “ Inseparable all day. Launch in the 
morning to shore. A round of golf on a deserted 
course. Back to a merry meal with the long-tongued 
Mrs. McK. and the simple sold in goggles. Deck 
chairs in the sun, the others writing notes. Confi¬ 
dences and further pictures of early girlish trials, 
fourth wall cunningly unbricked, a nice display of 
leg. A snore. The man asleep. Man f What is the 
word? ” 

And yet another. (< All day in cabin. Headache, 
with the object of being missed. An appearance in 
the afternoon, nicely pale and depressed. Transparent 
frock against the sun — utterly unappreciated. Wel¬ 
come brotherly but brief. Deck tennis with M.F. 
preferred to sitting with me. Mrs. McK. on the 
German mark instead. Bridge after dinner. Might 
just as well have been a boy.” 

This one, too. “ Bathed from boat. Both men with 
me. Skin-tight costume. Exhausted halfway back. 
Rescued and warmed from faint. But not a flicker 
of an eye!* 

And this. “Reconstructions. Sex appeal and the 
old old tricks to be discarded. He is armoured in 
loyalty. Tactics in future, friendship and trust. A 


86 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


girl of supreme courage fighting her way. Humour 
and grit the keynote. Not hardened and cynical from 
early sufferings and unhappy marriage, but optimistic 
with belief in human nature. Establish the sort of 
mannish relations that will make it easy to ask for 
money help. That, bar a turn of luck, a rift within 
the lute, all that can be achieved.” 

Finally, the summing up, shrewd and well observed. 
“ A sportsman, married for love. A married bachelor 
in a barbed-wire fence. Kind, sympathetic, generous, 
impatient, hates grousing. Supremely satisfied with 
one woman, unlike every other man. As a companion, 
delightful but elusive. As a playfellow, workmanlike 
but infrequent. Knows beasts and fishes backwards 
but women not at all. Probably the reincarnation of 
Robinson Crusoe, with Malcolm Fraser as Man Friday. 
A man's man. Would be in his element in war or on 
a desert island. He likes me when I laugh, leaves me 
when I cry, ignores me when I snuggle. I have never 
met his sort before. Damn.” 

Well, there it was. It was good, at any rate, to know 
exactly where she stood and what the trip was worth. 
“ You have a friend in me,” and that was true. Aston¬ 
ishment, of course. Think of Valentine, and the boys 
who buzzed round Rutland Gate. But failure, only in 
so far as the common methods of those easy days were 
utterly without appeal. The luxury of the Galatea 
was something that she had never enjoyed before. 
“ Make the best of every minute of it, old thing,” she 
told herself, “ and be content with what you’ve done. 
If you can’t catch Pelham Franklin when his wife is 
going to have a baby, at any rate you can establish 
banking relations and win a letter of credit.” 

And with that alternative still to be clinched, Mrs. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


87 


Valentine Beamish arranged herself in a more cousinly 
juxtaposition to Pelham’s chair. It had given her the 
shock of her short experienced life not to have been 
able to bring a married man to the kissing point with 
all her well-done tricks. 


VI 

“ I think I will,” said Malcolm and filled his glass 
again. A cigar went better on that particular Cognac 
than anything he knew. 

The owner of the Galatea, wearing a beautiful tan, 
lit a post-lunch pipe. “ The soothing lull of water out 
of earshot of the earth,” he said, remembering a line 
from his friend’s most recent effort. 

Which pleased him very much. There are few 
thrills greater to a maker of words than the quotation 
of them at a fitting moment. He took a low, deep 
chair that caught the small of the back. There was 
not a thing that called. “ Gorgeous, unbelievable,” he 
said, seizing a chance to let himself go as a poet some¬ 
times must. “ Ten days ago, before I came aboard 
this planet. . . .” 

“Ten days! Good Lord.” 

“ I’d been standing among the hideous sensations 
of a world at peace. Every edition of the paper re¬ 
joiced in making them worse. The self-governing 
Irish were cutting their brothers’ throats. France, 
playing Shylock on the European stage, was demand¬ 
ing her pound of flesh from the bony German bosom, 
and England, at the mercy of Lloyd George, was 


88 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

watching her self-made President hand Russia to the 
Huns.” 

Oh, well, there was nothing to be done but lie back 
and let him work it off. 

“ Not a cable from any part of the world that didn't 
contain a strike, bloodshed, the fear of ruin, the 
demand for a larger air-force, the poison of the Bol- 
shevics, the pathos of new conferences, the grumbles 
of Kings in exile, the rattle of unemployed cash boxes, 
the seditious stretchings of everybody’s notions, and 
the movements of the Four Horsemen still riding over 
the earth. From every country, over every wire, the 
same old story of Prime Minister Canutes trembling 
on the edge of rising tides. . . . And then, what? 
Isolation on this floating star, the world forgetting by 
the world forgot.” 

“ A drug,” said Pelham, getting suddenly to his 
feet. He didn’t give a hang for all the worries of the 
world. There was Beatrix, his girl, moving nearer 
and nearer to the crisis in which he couldn’t help. 
To-morrow, the next day, any time, the call might • 
come from her to carry him headlong back to land and 
reality, to stand and wait in fear. 

In his desire to indulge in a riot of phrases in order 
to keep his brain oiled, Malcolm, kindest of men, had 
failed to look forward, for once, to the possibility of 
reminding his friend of the trouble that hung over his 
head. And all these days he had been conspiring with 
Mrs. McKenzie to talk of everyone but Beatrix. Fool! 
Idiot! Juggler with words. Now he must yank old 
Pelham back to normal ground again. “ No, not a 
drug, old boy. A tonic. A holiday. Something that 
will make us able to dive into the whirlpool better able 
to swim.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


89 


“ I hope you’re right,” said Pelham. “ The whole 
ten days have been a nightmare. I’d a damn sight 
rather have remained at home. 

“ Is that grateful? Haven’t we all done our best to 
give you peace of mind? ” 

“ Yes, but if you think that’s possible you have a 
quaint idea of me.” 

It was no good to argue the point. Malcolm knew 
perfectly well what Pelham had been through after a 
quick relapse. He had heard him pacing the deck at 
night, had watched him, with brotherly pride, control 
himself to conform. The trip had done nothing but 
clap a lid on a volcano. He, too, had suffered, loving 
the girl at home. But she, at any rate, had been left 
to concentrate. He reminded Pelham of this and won 
a nod of agreement. And having smoothed things 
down again went off at a tangent, quick. 

“ Tell me about May Beamish.” 

“ Is there anything to tell? You know as much 
about her as I do.” 

“ No, I don’t. She never talks to me.” 

“ She hasn’t talked much to me either, as far as I 
remember. I make her out to be a very good sort 
though. Sensible and as straight as a line. Had a 
pretty rotten deal one way and another. Large family 
and a struggling father and finally a war marriage. 
She’s all right. Great courage and laughs a lot. I 
back her to get through. I like her. We’re excellent 
friends. I shall ask Beatrix to be kind.” 

Which confirmed Malcolm in his belief that she was 
a very clever girl. A simple soul, himself, and easily 
taken in, he had had no suspicions of her plan, no 
remote idea that she was ruthlessly set upon self- 
preservation. But he had watched her rather closely 


90 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


because of Mrs. McKenzie’s statement of her power 
to whistle every man to her heel. And he had seen her 
instant realization that the display of stockings was 
lost on Pelham. He had caught her blank amaze¬ 
ment, too, when, after the episode of the rescue from 
drowning, in which somehow he didn’t believe, — she 
swam like a fish, — Pelham’s muscular massage had 
left him cold. That expression had stuck. . . . Um. 
Decidedly clever, that girl. But he doubted whether 
Beatrix would be kind! 

And as they went on deck a motor boat left shore, 
and headed for the yacht. A telegraph boy was aboard. 
Was this the call, at last? 

“ Galatea? ” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Pelham Franklin? ” 

“ Yes. What is it?” 

“ Wire.” 

With one foot on the boat the man whose heart had 
jumped into his mouth, read the message, looked up 
at Malcolm with lips gone white, gave an order, and 
sat beside the boy who was the messenger of fate. 

Voices and the splurge of water brought Mrs. 
McKenzie to the rail. “ Ah,” she said. “ To boy or 
not to boy, that is the question. . . . Look. The dear 
old thing has actually gone away without his hat.” 

Alone, forward, with her hand on Pelham’s chair, 
the girl who was sensible and as straight as a line 
watched the passing of the man who hadn’t fallen. “ I 
don’t mind his not waving his hand,” she said to her¬ 
self, “ so long as he’ll be free with his cheques.” 

And for a long time Malcolm Fraser remained 
where he had been left, staring at the sun-bathed quay 
on which his friend had landed, his whole heart filled 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


91 


with prayer. He had loved Beatrix long before 
Pelham had known her, — poor devil of a poet in 
goggles. 


VII 

“ I sent for the doctor two hours ago,” Aunt 
Honoria said, “ and my telegram at the same time. 
I promised you that . . . steady, my son.” 

“ Oh, rather,” said Pelham, “ steady as a rock,” 
though he felt that his teeth were chattering. He 
must get to his room, in the dark. 

“ You will dine, of course? ” 

“ Yes. That is, no. I’ve had all the dinner I want.” 
(Oh, please go!) 

“ Well, then, I shall wait in the drawing-room, Pel. 
If you feel the need to talk . . .” 

“ Thanks most awfully, yes.” Had she any more 
to say ? Couldn’t she see that like an ill dog he wanted 
to hide himself out of sight? 

But it was too great a moment in family history to 
leave undramatized. And even Aunt Honoria became 
just woman in her emotion. Beatrix might have been 
hers. 

“ Don’t lock the door of your room,” she said. “ I 
may have to ask you to help.” 

“ Ready at any time. Come along whenever you 
feel like it.” 

And for a moment they stood facing each other, 
polite and smiling and calm. Then the crack, the quick 


92 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


human movement of both, the white head against the 
broad shoulder. 

“ Oh, my little girl! ” 

“ Oh, my God! ” 

And so he didn’t lock his door. With the snow of 
the moon on the window sills he marched those hours 
away; up one side of his den and across, down the 
other side and across; routine unvaried, like that of 
the sentinel whose enemy was Death. On all the net¬ 
work of lines laid down by a love-made imagination 
his brain went off, at a rush. All but one of them led 
to the room upstairs, through what she had given to 
him and what he might have given to her; through 
places marked with happiness, misunderstanding, for¬ 
giveness; through junctions of wounded vanity, 
laughter, and unforgetable joy. But there was one 
that led beyond, through heartbreak to a grave. . . . 
At that he stood for a moment, cold and dumb, and 
went down on his knees. Oh, God, who looks down 
on little people, let him keep his wife. If she were 
taken how could he repay? 

And when, with a feeling of great kindness on his 
shoulder, he got upon his feet, he left the darkness of 
that room, the silence of that gravestone, the selfish¬ 
ness of that suffering and went into the woman who 
might have to ask his help. 

High of chin and straight of back she held out her 
hand as he came. “ Thank you,” she said, “ for 
remembering an old woman.” 

But it was she who had to be thanked. Women 
are braver than men. 

And so, in mutual help, they passed the rest of the 
time together, talking quietly as though they were 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


93 


waiting for Beatrix to come back from the town, 
rising when finally the door was thrown back, both 
unable to speak. 

“ Good morning. Fine boy.” 









PART III 


I 

Malcolm Fraser was in the mood for rain. 

Not because he was a man with a garden and in 
sympathy with vegetables, or one who went in for 
ducks and owned a dried-up pond. Not because he 
had felt impelled to invite two of his hostesses to tea 
and hoped a disgusting outburst of the clouds would 
make them let him off. But for the far more human 
reason that his brain had turned to mud, and not a 
single line of all his concentration had come out right. 

He had slept well, too; had received a check for 
the enormous sum of sixty-eight dollars from the pub¬ 
lishers of his last collection of poems and had read a 
clipping from one of the Book Reviews in which he 
was referred to as a singer of mellifluous rhymes by 
a man whose verse had achieved the yearly fame of 
Christmas cards. Such is criticism! Also he had 
gone to work with the temporary optimism of one 
who had exercised sufficient self-restraint to leave his 
paper on the outside of the door, so that he had not 
been crushed beneath the falling mark, or smothered 
under the daily deluge of broken promises. 

All about him in his den were his small familiar 
gods, — prints in the few spaces unoccupied by books, 
quaint pieces of china picked up in places just as 
quaint, and all the other things that gather round a 
man on his way through life whose eye responds to 


96 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


color and sympathies to age and who rattles in his 
pocket a surplus of small coins. For further com¬ 
panionship a droll green parrot of uncertain years who 
restrained himself to silence when his master was 
working, though at other times, and especially at the 
sight of strange faces, ran rapidly through a repertoire 
of cat music and pre-Prohibition sounds, bars of the 
comic songs of early ’go vintage and all too life-like 
imitations of chauffeurs with catarrh. . . . The enor¬ 
mous surprise that he conveyed in his way of saying 
“ Wow! ” may have been engendered from having sat 
so long in a window that overlooked the main door of 
the Algonquin. His interest in the arrival of dramatic 
critics to lunch remained as keen as ever. For one or 
two of the actresses of the younger school he had 
devised a special greeting. When the window was 
open during the summer months he was coached into . 
a vocabulary of Irish porter words that caused a havoc 
of laughter among Malcolm’s visiting friends. The 
beast — he was more than a bird — was worth his 
weight in gold. 

But the day was one of those that almost make the 
use of wine unnecessary in New York. A blue and 
cloudless sky, a breeze that came from Bowling Green 
filled with flecks of spray, and an exhilaration that sent 
the City’s spirits up to the water tanks of its highest 
buildings like floating scraps of paper. Rain failing 
altogether the poet with the fruitless pen welcomed the 
sudden jangle of the telephone bell which completed 
the morning’s ruin. 

It was Pelham Franklin calling up from home. 

“ Come down this afternoon? You bet your life I 
will. No, I won’t forget to ram pyjamas in a bag or 
a tooth brush either. You’ve sent a car to town? 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


97 


Fine. Mine’s gone phut at last. You’ve saved my 
life, old boy. I was on the verge of cutting my throat. 
Now I think I’ll chuck writing and live on writers. 
My love to Beatrix and a million thanks.” 

Why slave at writing small mellifluous songs when 
he was asked to be a part of a living poem? Why 
force himself to sit for lonely hours in a bachelor 
apartment house when he was asked to stretch his soul 
in the country and welcome back to active life the girl 
whose convalescence was at an end? “ We must have 
you here for the great day,” Pelham had said, making 
the wire tingle with excitement. “ It’s to-morrow. 
Beatrix comes down again to-morrow. Drop every¬ 
thing and come. To-night we’ll talk things over and 
you shall see the boy.” 

The boy, — her boy! . . . He’d have to steel him¬ 
self to that. 

He ripped the half-covered page from its block and 
chucked it under his desk. Death and the great here¬ 
after when there were life and love? Who had 
doomed him to be a poet in any case, when he might 
have been a golf-pro? Had his mother felt assured 
that he was to be born with an ugly face and without 
the gift of making money and given him the kink of 
singing words to compensate for the loss of love? A 
man must have cash as well as good looks to get the 
modern girl for a wife; though cash by itself is often 
enough. 

And as he put his things in a bag and ate the lunch 
that he had ordered up, and buttered a collar instead 
of a roll and put in a knife instead of a razor, stalking 
from den to bedroom and thanking his stars for the 
chance to escape, the parrot became as mad as he, 
opening bottles of champagne one after another, let- 


98 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


ting Apollinaris burst all over the floor, oozing out the 
corks of heavy port and fizzing soda water into a 
glass. Not content with this relief from well-trained 
silence he gave a recital of a cat fight that would have 
made the fortune of a variety artist. 

Fed up with the Muse, himself and the parrot, 
Malcolm needed to talk. So he took the seat by the 
chauffeur instead of riding alone. Though born in 
Brooklyn and never once nearer to Ireland than Boston 
it was this man who did the talking, and amazing stuff 
it was. More Irish than the Irish he held forth all the 
way, murdering England, shooting up Ulster, cursing 
Collins and crowning de Valera with a wreath of 
thorns. It was only by a series of flukes that the car 
remained on the road. But it was vastly interesting 
to Malcolm after three weeks of imprisonment, and 
it made him ask himself, once more, how sanity could 
ever come back to the world. This man and millions 
like him had the vote. 

The country behind the advertising boards was very 
green and gay. Long before Greenwich came into 
view Malcolm had learnt by heart the fact that Barrie’s 
latest picture had been re-named and re-constructed by 
the Master of Movie men. Shaking off the road’s 
illustrations and the frequency of Fords, they found 
themselves at last, with relief, among long stretches 
of uninterrupted hills and hollows, woods, farms, golf 
courses and meadows sprinkled with wild flowers. 
Then, finally, quiet houses among lilacs, — and peace. 
And when they turned into the avenue which led to 
Pelham's place they saw that April had gone over the 
hill and May was middle-aged. And Malcolm asked 
himself why the devil he struggled to compete with 
the greatest of poets, why he endeavored to interpret 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


99 


the soul and spirit of Nature when she did it so well 
herself. For sixty-eight dollars from his publishers 
and a line in a book review? 

But he was beyond depression now and thirty-two 
miles from his ink-well. Here was poetry and here 
was friendship and upstairs in that charming house 
was the girl no man could deny him the right to love 
as long as there was loving. To-morrow, the great 
day, he would give her welcome, slim and eager, to a 
new beginning , . . and see the boy. 


II 

“ Tea in my den,” said Pelham, and headed for it, 
with his arm round Malcolm’s shoulder. They had 
camped together and sailed together, been in the same 
tight places, shared a mutual purse, sworn to the same 
code, discovered and held to the same beliefs and 
emerged in brotherhood. There was no envy in 
Malcolm’s heart because Beatrix was the wife of his 
friend. She loved him. Therefore Pelham was the 
better man. 

And once in the chair that he had owned for years, 
Malcolm forgot his loneliness and the bad morning 
and rhymes. In this room and house he had the sense 
of belonging, of being attached. How good that was! 
“ Now tell me about her,” he said . . . “ and the 
boy.” 

“ Beatrix first,” replied Pelham. “ You shall see 
the boy and judge.” The parental grin was all over 
his face, wonderful to behold. Lemon, two lumps and 


* * 


100 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


no water. No need to ask about that. “ Well, it’s 
to-morrow. . . . God, how long I’ve waited! Months, 
years almost. Eve been a lodger in life all the time. 
A big price to pay for a bit of a boy, I thought, until 
he caught hold of my finger. By George, what a grip 
and what an eye for a gun. And the way he knows 
me and chortles. But, as I said, you shall see for your¬ 
self. Prepare to be amazed. . . . Well, it’s to-mor¬ 
row.” And being no poet he left it like that. 

And being a poet and a lover in dreams, Malcolm 
knew all the rest, by heart. 

Very handy, tea. There is so commonplace a rattle 
of spoon against cup and something so fat and ordinary 
about a china pot. A proper tea drinker would as 
soon be shot as pour it from silver. And as to muffins, 
whoever supposed that they have feelings? Cold, yes, 
perhaps, of neglect. 

“ I try to make mine like this,” said Malcolm. 
“ But I’m frightfully undomestic.” 

And somehow Pelham laughed. Who knew as well 
that wool-gathering old beggar sitting, be-goggled, in 
muddle and symbols, ink-stained and drinking tannin, 
and his priceless gift of finding a tangent that led 
straight away from too emotional lines ? 

Malcolm had worked for that laugh and stuck it in 
his button-hole like the order of the Elks. He had 
seen Pelham at the time when Beatrix had brought 
him down to his knees at her feet. He had watched 
him under the inarticulate excitement of the ceremony 
that had taken place in a shabby registrar’s office. He 
had read the meaning of his restlessness and fear dur¬ 
ing the recent days and nights on the Galatea. Here 
was the bridegroom again, but with this difference. 
To the hunger of love and desire there were added 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


101 


now the admiration, respect and inexpressible gratitude 
for the courage of his wife and the deed that she had 
done — to him, as to all right fathers of a first child, 
the greatest of deeds. There was no need for him to 
tell. Here, too, was the man of one great love, fit and 
hard and sun-tanned, proud of that boy to the full 
extent of pride; the very simple outdoor man whose 
face was marked with suffering and pain and whose 
soul was tempered like the fine steel of a sword by 
the anguish of an exquisite sympathy. Not the same 
Pelham of the days of unattachment, killing time with¬ 
out a cause. Not the man without responsibility going 
from selfishness to selfishness. But one who had 
found the key to life — an enviable man, because it 
was an elusive key to most. 

And he went on, assisted by a pipe. He had been 
bottled up so long. “ Beatrix has made a good recov¬ 
ery. The doctor insisted on keeping her very quiet and 
so she’s been barb-wired off from everyone except the 
boy, Aunt Honoria and the old brown hen. I’ve been 
let in, of course. Of course, the family is waiting for 
to-morrow, when it’s coming to lunch and all that. 
Books have been sent down by the ton. I said that 
I’ve been let in, but somehow, — I dunno, one or other 
of the nurses stood about and I got in the way of the 
doctor and Brownie fussed and fussed. She always 
resented me. And also there has been, which I don’t 
understand, a sort of formality, a sort of shyness . . . 
and something in her smile. . . . Well, it’s to-mor¬ 
row. Then I’ll find out. I don’t think I’ve done any¬ 
thing. I’ve tried to think. It’s just convalescence I 
take it and the little strangeness. Yes, that’s it. And 
what Beatrix calls dramatizing, — working it all up. 
But there’s been something in her smile. . . .” 


102 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


And he got up and stood gazing at the china teapot, 
like a puzzled stork. He had said more than he had 
intended, even to Malcolm, but he had got it off his 
chest. 

And so Malcolm, knowing that he must give an 
answer, put himself in Beatrix’s place. It wasn’t easy, 
even for a poet. But, after all, hadn’t she provided 
the answer? “ It’s a sense of humor and love of mis¬ 
chief,” he said. “ It makes her dramatize, — she told 
you so. And shyness, very natural, becomes formal¬ 
ity, in a sort of way. Wasn’t there just the same thing 
in her smile when I left you both on the Galatea for 
the honeymoon? Think back.” 

Wheeling round, with all his puzzlement lifted, 
Pelham nodded. “ Just,” he said. “ You’re right. 
Good. Where the hell would I be without you? ” He 
looked a new man. 

A lot they knew about women, these two. 

Or babies. 

A woman wheeled a perambulator past the win¬ 
dows, — a woman with a face as hard and unresponsive 
as that of one of the lions that keep people out of 
public buildings. One to whom a new-born child 
means no more than another certainty of bed, board 
and wages; not a possible genius in embryo, a great 
inventor, a master crook, the saviour of his race, or 
an addition to the large army of mere citizens and 
ratepayers; not even the concrete expression of love, 
unlike anything else of the kind, of a character, a 
beauty, a wonder exclusively its own to the man and 
woman to whom it belonged. In fact, a nurse. 

“ Come on out and see the boy,” said Pelham, with 
the parental grin again. 

And when Malcolm, on the very verge of a jealousy 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


103 


that he’d never known before, followed out and 
through the hall and round the front of the house, he 
stood at the side of that little sleeping thing never so 
much the poor devil of a poet in goggles. There was 
a needle running through and through his heart. 

“ Doesn’t he sleep like nothing you ever saw? Did 
you ever see such a nose and a chin as firm? Wonder¬ 
ful little chap. I’d wake him so that you could see 
his eyes, — really extraordinary, Mai — but he tries 
to say so much when he’s awake that he must get all 
the rest he can. To-morrow you shall be introduced. 
He’s got to know his father’s oldest pal. Ssh! Not 
so loud! ” 

But Malcolm hadn’t stirred a finger or said a word. 
Only one great cry had echoed through his soul. 
“ Beatrix, — oh, my love.” 


Ill 

Like all husbands Pelham was completely happy 
only when his wife’s relations were enjoying them¬ 
selves at least a hundred miles away from his house. 
A man, after all, never promises to love, honor and 
obey his mother-in-law, or with all his worldly goods 
to endow his wife’s father, brothers and sisters, uncles, 
aunts and cousins. In the history of every marriage 
the coping-stone of dissension is laid invariably by the 
subtle interference of those who, naturally enough, take 
sides against the husband and endeavor, probably 
with the best intentions, to teach the wife the way 
to run her home. A wise husband, who must be, 


104 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


therefore, a strong man and tactful, establishes at once 
a golden rule in regard to his in-laws. He gives his 
wife carte blanche to entertain them at lunch and din¬ 
ner, but he puts his foot down, and keeps it there, on 
every hint to spend the night. One night, with its 
morning list of reconstruction, and the coping-stone 
arrives. There is always the same old story of bath¬ 
room towels and pillow cases, the wrong way of mak¬ 
ing toast and coffee, of dusting stairs and answering 
telephones. It has never yet been truthfully owned 
that the serpent in the garden of Eden was Eve’s 
maternal parent. 

When Pelham said to Malcolm that the family was 
waiting for to-morrow and coming to lunch and all 
that, there was, it must be confessed, a slight shudder 
of impatience and resentment in the tail of that state¬ 
ment. “ All that,” embraced, of course, the inevitable 
fuss and excitement and wreckage of peace that would 
accompany Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke, and the Major, 
especially under the circumstances. A fine boy meant 
to them the fulfilment of the last of their ambitions. 
With this he was in the most complete sympathy and 
would delight in showing off the greatest invention the 
world had ever seen. But being himself in a high 
state of emotion he would have preferred to welcome 
the return of Beatrix to daily life in private, with only 
Malcolm present. Aunt Honoria who had the most 
perfect discretion was welcome to remain. He was 
everlastingly grateful to her. 

However, there it was. Beatrix had commanded the 
presence of the family and he had had nothing to say. 
Wasn’t this her day, and hadn’t she won the right 
to disrupt the earth as well as his house by the per¬ 
formance of this deed? And so as an American hus- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


105 


band, the most docile of them all, he intended to be 
as good as gold and play up like a Saint, — though 
he detested Saints and all their pacifistic ways. Even 
family days came to an end at last and by five o’clock 
he knew that Mr. Vanderdyke would begin to fret 
about getting back to dinner. The rest of the day 
would be his. 

“ All that,” was however, by a letter written by 
Beatrix to her mother a week ago, to contain far more 
than just the family, though Pelham was in blissful 
ignorance of this. The postscript, — the meat of 
every woman’s letter, — contained the following subtle 
lines. “ Do you think it would be kind to ask Eliza¬ 
beth McKenzie to stay with you for three or four days 
and bring her over when you come? She was very 
nice to Pelham on the Galatea and is his cousin, after 
all. We ought, I feel, to show our gratitude for that, 
and she greatly admires you. But if you agree with 
me it will mean asking Mrs. Beamish, because she is 
staying at her house I hear and cannot very well be 
left behind. It will give me the chance to thank this 
English girl for helping Elizabeth to keep Pelham 
amused during his anxious time. I have inherited, 
you see, your well-known habit of paying people back. 
I only suggest this, mind, and leave it entirely to you, 
dearest mother. You know so much better what to 
do than I.” 

In the answer that came by return, a typical Mrs. 
Vanderdyke missive which began with the weather, 
went on sarcastically to the Senate, stamped on the 
face of a neighbor, touched upon the ailments of 
“ your poor father ” with a frightful effort at humor 
and came to the point at issue on the inside of the first 
sheet, so that the whole thing was a puzzle in construe- 


106 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


tion and almost as difficult to decipher as a Persian 
poem, it was announced that a royal invitation to 
E. McK. had included her guest “ named I see, darling, 
after that worried boy in Calverley’s foolish poem.” 
The whole elaborate thing written in a Peignoir during 
the writing hour on paper so plain and thick that it 
could only belong to a person who wished it to be 
known that she was far beyond the contingency of 
losing caste. 

Thus does the modern daughter finesse with a 
woman of an older and a simpler generation. 

And when Brownie was given the letter to read and 
asked in blank amazement why Beatrix had gone to 
work to get not only the unnecessary Mrs. McK. to 
such a strictly family affair, but the unknown Mrs. 
Beamish, who had no claim to be present at all, the 
truth came out, as it always did between these two. 

“ Yes, I know,” said Beatrix, “ it seems absurd. 
But the other day I happened to stumble by accident 
on a letter from the Beamish written to my husband. 
I knew he’d had one because he gave me a message 
from his cousin, and reminded of something suddenly 
that he had tucked away in his brain, asked me to be 
kind to the Galatea girl. That meant that the crinkly 
thing I had felt in his pocket was a little letter from 
her, and I don’t mind telling you , Brownie dear, that I 
pinched it in the most wifely way. . . . Now don’t 
run off with the idea that Pm jealous. Pm not and I 
should be a rotter if I were. But I’ll tell you what I 
am. I’m all against standing blandly by while my 
husband, who knows nothing about women and very 
much less about cats, is made the banker of one who 
signs herself ‘ ever your wee friend, May.’ Oh, a 
very clever letter, Brownie, in large round ingenuous 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


107 


writing, slanting backwards, the inevitable sign of a 
sponge. Nothing in it that couldn’t be read aloud; 
bad luck accepted with courage and even joked about. 
The cunning was between the lines and only to be 
twigged by a wife. So now you know why I’m having 
her here, — to nip this thing in the bud. We shall 
have a lovely day to-morrow. Oh, lovely! Congratu¬ 
lations, family joy, life to begin again, — and your 
wee friend May to tackle. You watch me deal with 
her! ” 

“ I will,” said Brownie, with gusto. “ Did you ever \ 
I always said that Mrs. McKenzie is very careless in 
her choice of friends.” 

And then, without a word of warning, Beatrix 
sprang to her stockingless feet, threw back her head, 
gave a scream of surging vitality and commenced to 
spring dance in her undies round and round the little 
brown hen. In the sparkle of her eyes, the flash of 
her teeth, the gleam of her young limbs she gave out 
the gorgeous fact that she was back in life again, slim 
and eager. And with a delicious touch of caricature 
of those too unconscious maidens who choose a 
moment to indulge in virginal prancings when a camera 
is at work, she sprang and twirled and re-sprang until 
all her breath was gone. Half crying and half laugh¬ 
ing she collapsed upon a rug, to die, like Pavlova, the 
snowy death of the swan. 

“ Oh, my dear!” cried Brownie. “Please!” to 
whom this natural outburst, thanksgiving, rejuvena¬ 
tion, in such a costume too, was in the nature of an 
exhibition somewhat shocking to her class. 

She was in for another surprise before she left the 
room, — one that was going to drive sleep away that 
night, and, because she knew her Beatrix, gave her a 


108 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


dread of the future that made her break into gooseflesh. 

On her feet again Beatrix went over to the window, 
quiet, and cool, and unapproachable, and as far from 
the faithful Brownie as though they stood on different 
stars. Pelham and Malcolm were walking in the gar¬ 
den, the one lithe and brown and of the country, the 
other soft and pale of the city. And after watching 
them in a long silence that Brownie tried to break by 
opening drawers and pushing chairs about, — she knew 
better than to speak, — she turned. A sort of formal¬ 
ity, a sort of shyness, a little strangeness, and some¬ 
thing in her smile. . . . And then the old chuckle and 
the devil of mischief and the gooseflesh statement. 

“ Brownie, I’m very much afraid that an imp’s 
on my shoulder again.” 


IV 

And so there was May Beamish, enjoying painfully 
and with the natural envy of a poor parson’s daughter 
suffering from a starved desire for luxury, the pomp 
and thick carpets of the house of Vanderdyke. 

The muddled house of the kind Elizabeth was, of 
course, as different from her Aunt’s in Rutland Gate 
as a set of rooms in the Buckingham to a family suite 
at the Ritz. It did, and that was all. It was in the 
East Fifties, which was, of course, in its favor. Its 
old brown front had been replaced by marble and 
stone and ironwork, it was true, and its door was 
beneath the level of the street, in the approved way. 
Three steps down meant just as much to the standing 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


109 


of a house in 1922 as twelve steps up in 1888. It had 
its three old masters, the least that a banker may have 
and hold his own, and it had its footman and its crests 
on the dinner service and several priceless rugs. It 
had a library and an elevator and the interior decora¬ 
tion of one of the numerous young women who skim 
through a book on Period Furniture, put three chairs 
and a brass candlestick in an upper window in Madison 
Avenue and call themselves experts. It had a Queen 
Anne chest, made in Brooklyn, on the black and white 
pavement of the small square hall and The Cries of 
London with their margins gone in the boudoir. The 
drawing-room was Empire, all very well done in De¬ 
troit. But . . . 

The Vanderdyke House! Ah. Here the chest of 
“ your wee friend May ” expanded and all her dreams 
came true. This,—this was the real thing. Tradi¬ 
tion, dignity, corridors, marble pillars, Gobelin tapes¬ 
tries, two Rembrandt portraits of old Dutch Vander- 
dykes brought over from the grave and stately house 
in Amsterdam; cabinets of the rarest porcelains, and 
tiles which dealers would give their gold teeth just to 
touch; first editions, three men in plush, a Ducal butler, 
a Breakfast Room; hush; a fountain playing to twit¬ 
tering love birds in a Conservatory, bronzes flagrantly 
nude; a writing table in every bedroom, sealing-wax, 
note paper and stamps; strange things in every bath¬ 
room to puzzle the uninitiated eye. 

Here, in the regal rooms in which, almost without 
regret, an ex-Emperor could ponder in comfort on 
former theatricalism and ineffable miscalculation, May 
had spent three breathless, jealous days. But for the 
war, which now seemed more than ever to have been 
made to spoil her individual life, the B. B. Steamship 


110 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Company would have placed her in similar suitable 
surroundings. She had been born with a feeling for 
all these things. She had inherited from her wretched 
father’s forbears an eye for objets d’art. Her innate 
sense of plates made her recognize their aristocracy 
without turning them upside down. Old Masters 
touched responsive notes that made music in her soul. 
Blood tingled in the tips of her fingers at the sight of 
every antique. She glowed before Gobelins, gasped in 
front of Sevres, worshipped at the feet of primitives, 
palpitated to the call of prints. And as she went 
slowly from one Vanderdyke gem to another the trag¬ 
edy of having been born to the cheap Axminster and 
broken wicker-work of the Rectory brought on a 
spasm of unrealized expensiveness and gave her one 
full hour of the joy of martyrdom. But she allowed 
herself no more, being practical and young. 

By one of those odd coincidences that happen every 
minute she went up to her room to think things over 
at the moment when Beatrix talked to Brownie about 
nipping it in the bud, and Pelham, in answer to Mal¬ 
colm’s question, said “ Mrs. Beamish? Let’s see. Yes. 
I had a letter, but I don’t know what the dickens I did 
with it. Frightfully careless, but it was quite cheerful 
and didn’t call for a reply.” 

She knew how she stood. It was not her way to 
specialize in the art of self-deception or twist the 
meaning of words. The Galatea had broken the ice 
with Franklin and proved to him that she was his wee 
friend. No more. If he were a man of fifty, or even 
forty-five, she would be going to his house to-morrow 
on a different footing. She would be in a position to 
ask him for anything she liked. But, in addition to 
being in love with his wife, he was only thirty-five, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


111 


deaf and blind to the sex rattle of herself or any other 
girl. That was the devil of it. That was what made 
the whole thing most difficult and unusual. Work? 
Yes, she would have to do so indeed, with the utmost 
diplomacy and cunning, on tiptoe. She couldn’t stay 
much longer under the McKenzie roof. She’d wear 
out her welcome and lose a friend. McKenzie, it was 
true, was over fifty, but then he was a financier and 
got all his excitement downtown. Which was a pity. 
But there was something about the way in which she 
had met Franklin that appealed to her superstitious 
side. She had been taken on board the Galatea after 
she had been in America for several weeks and nothing 
good had come out of them. She had begun to think 
that all the stories of New York’s rich men were fables 
because up till then everyone who had dined with the 
McKenzies had talked poor, exposed the wounds of 
Income Tax and complained of Bad Business. It had 
depressed her, this epidemic from which she had hoped 
to escape, and made her ask herself if she wouldn’t 
have done better to have saved her expensive passage 
on the Aquitania and given Germany a try. But 
the Galatea had spelt money. All the facts about 
Franklin that she had managed to squeeze from Mrs. 
McKenzie without appearing to ask ran into oodles of 
money. The whole yacht reeked of money, and dollar 
bills flew round its mastheads like seagulls. Then, 
too, the name Galatea had seemed so right, so appropri¬ 
ate. She would have backed it to her last shilling. 
And, finally, to clinch everything, the man who owned 
it was at a loose end at a time notoriously useful to 
little women adrift in the world. 

Franklin had gone ashore, however, just at the 
moment when she had been about to place herself 


112 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


permanently on his list of charities, a most undeserved 
misfortune, on top of the complete revision of her 
usual easy methods, and many days of a delicacy in 
approach that would have done credit to a psycho¬ 
analyst or a professional confidence man. She had to 
open up, therefore, a new attack, a new encircling 
movement. She had so to work things as to make 
herself most pleasing to the wife and in this way obtain 
an invitation for at least a week. On the golf course, 
and during those moments of necessity during which 
the boy was nursed, she would then be able, she had 
no doubt, to regain her former position and go one 
better. A plain statement of her case, made with a 
brave smile but a little tremble of the lips, a blunt 
unvarnished story of how she must earn a living in 
the oldest of the professions or starve, and Franklin, 
if she had read him truly, would devote an atom of 
his millions to the beautiful work of rescue. On the 
income derived from such a generous gift she might 
not be able to buy or even rent a dear old house in 
England, chucked away as they were, but she could go 
and live in a Castle in Austria which would rival the 
Vanderdyke house and start a collection of china and 
prints that would bring joy to her heart. 

“ So there you are, my dear,” she said, winding up. 
“ That’s the scheme. I shall like this Beatrix, I know. 
The photographs all over the Galatea show a most 
attractive face. And it’s so much less trouble really 
to like than to be obliged to act. Here’s to the great 
day then. God save the working girl.” 

Little your wee friend May knew of the Beatrix 
fighting spirit. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


113 


V 

And it was a great day, say what you will. 

Here was that anachronism an idealist in well-cut 
clothes, an artist with short hair, a sybarite who had 
risen hungry from every meal, a man with far too 
much money who had made a collection of nothing 
but health. Here was one of those rare men who, 
without being a prig, a coward, or one who had gazed 
with longing eyes at the flesh-pots through the barbed 
wire of a religion, had taken to marriage a whole and 
complete love, an ardor and a passion that had not 
been trifled with; to whom marriage was, therefore, 
a serious and a beautiful thing, not entered into in the 
modern way as a toss-up, a brief adventure easily 
emerged from by the payment of a few thousand 
dollars to a lawyer, but as a permanency, like patriot¬ 
ism, the allegiance to a country. Having been through 
the surprise, shock, and delight of a first child with a 
sympathy so exquisite and an imagination so agonizing 
as almost to have put him through the final pains, he 
was at last to welcome downstairs the girl who had 
added admiration to his love, and gratitude to his 
respect. 

And here was a girl who could not be found in 
any country but America, born to people of amazing 
wealth and brought up in an atmosphere which had 
everything of regality except the democratic spirit. 
Nothing that money could procure or the inventiveness 
of fond minds provide had been left out of a consistent 


114 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


plan to spoil and warp. She had the sort of beauty too 
that is quite enough to turn any young head and is 
as great a handicap to happiness as being an only child 
in these surroundings. If she had been destined to 
occupy a throne she could not have been more gro¬ 
tesquely fitted for that difficult job. Every minute 
of her infancy, childhood and adolescence had been 
mapped out to a routine calculated to inflate her ego¬ 
tism, enlarge her vanity, and lead her into the appalling 
belief that she had been divinely appointed. The inhu¬ 
man treatment which did not permit her to do the 
simplest thing for herself and made her see life 
through a body-guard of sycophants and flatterers 
ought to have molded her into a most unpleasant 
person. She had masters and mistresses for every con¬ 
ceivable and many quite inconceivable things, every 
one of them designed to unfit her for companionship, 
marriage and motherhood. And when the brains of 
her doting, foolish, and at the same time martinet 
parents ran dry specialists in the up-bringing of mil¬ 
lionaires’ daughters were hired to discover fresh 
absurdities for the poor child’s ruination. In this they 
very nearly succeeded. But for the possession of a 
sense of humor that nothing could overcome and which 
was most disconcerting to them all, like a squint in a 
statue of Psyche or a stammer in a man born to a 
place in the Cabinet, Beatrix would have come through 
permanently and triumphantly impossible. She had 
been temporarily unable to tell the truth during 
several periods of her young career, which was natural 
enough, and had then displayed so great a lack of 
consideration for other people’s feelings and so monu¬ 
mental an amount of impertinent autocracy towards 
everyone about her as to cause her family and her 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


115 


tutors to congratulate themselves on their handiwork, 
and Malcolm Fraser, her persistent friend, the man 
who had given her his heart before he had emerged 
from growing pains, almost to despair of her character. 

But the good angel who had been appointed to 
watch over her, and her own sense of humor which had 
survived through everything, to say nothing of poor 
little Brownie’s boundless faith in her power to con¬ 
quer the effects of Vanderdykeism, which had helped 
so much, had brought her through. Then came the 
last of these periods, during which she took it into 
her head to enjoy the feminine game of playing with 
fire in the bounder studio of Sutherland York, and 
stood up to her neck in a scandal that shook the fatu¬ 
ously complacent house of Vanderdyke to its deep 
foundations; lied herself out of this her last indul¬ 
gence and claimed Pelham as the man to whom she was 
secretly married; was put through a midnight hour 
of unforgetable indignity by him in her bedroom at 
home and then turned down on the very edge of what 
the French so poetically call le moment supreme; was 
taken on the Galatea on a sham honeymoon in order 
to stop the clacking tongues of New York, and was 
brought to her knees by love like any ordinary girl; 
was married in Ireland when that incurable country 
was suffering from the agonies of prosperity under 
the kindness of the British heel, and came back to 
Pelham’s cottage no longer the spoilt daughter of a 
millionaire but the charming normal girl who gave 
as much as she was taking because she loved as greatly 
as she was loved. 

To her, then, this was even a greater day than it 
was to her husband, who, though a millionaire like her 
father, had achieved the miracle of remaining normal. 


116 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


She had won the right to be numbered, in spite of all 
monarchial attempts to the contrary, among the human 
creatures who swarm out of the Subway. She had 
presented the dearest of gifts to the man who had 
brought her into realities and given a grandson to the 
family which in spite of it’s ability to buy the earth 
would otherwise have petered out. And last but by 
no means least she was slim and eager again, good to 
look at once more, able to play tennis and golf, to ride, 
to swim, to let her car go at the devil's own lick if 
she felt like it, and to dance all night if a super¬ 
abundant vitality was to be worn down in no other 
way. Another chapter of life and love, with April 
gone over the hill. 

And here was this futile and rather tragic family, 
— the father who had never recovered from the crush¬ 
ing weight of the gold that had descended upon him, 
and who had gone through life pestered by charities, 
societies, countries, begging letter-writers, widows, 
company promoters, inventors, drama societies, Art 
Institutes and gold brick merchants; bewildered be¬ 
tween the deprivation of self-help and self-expression 
and the hopeless inability to know what best to do 
with the superfluous money with which he had been 
punished for a sin that he hadn’t committed. The 
nebulous man, old before his time, who knew himself 
to be a paradox in the present condition of civilization 
and was without the energy, the spirit, or the strength 
of character to join the ranks of ordinary man; who 
clung pathetically to the far-off traditions of the pre¬ 
reformation Dutch nobility with one hand, and with 
the other clutched at the sham aristocracy that wealth 
has created in a democratic country, — a self-conscious 
multi-millionaire, a rare specimen in a human Zoo 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 117 

which was losing its other objects of public amazement 
one after another. A man without a son. 

The mother, a once beautiful and always foolish 
woman, who having, with the cold-blooded determina¬ 
tion of the female spider hunted poor Vanderdyke 
to the very steps of the altar, commenced her reign 
as the leader of New York Society with a resuscitation 
of lofty and exclusive pomp that awed and delighted 
the snobs and deeply impressed the newspapers. A 
woman who steeped herself in the chequered story of 
the Vanderdykes and came out of the pages of Dutch 
history with a higher chin and a more supercilious 
expression; who made several pilgrimages to Holland, 
lingered in the fifteenth century town house of the 
family on the Heerenstrade at Amsterdam which had 
become the head office of a Bank, drove through the 
neat and wonderfully cultivated country to Amers- 
foort, and gazed through the iron gates of an old and 
beautiful place which had been built for his bride by 
an early Baron and was now in the hands of a war 
‘profiteer’; spent many days in the Amsterdam Na¬ 
tional Gallery among the portraits of her husband’s 
ancestors by Rembrandt, Vandyke and Vanderveer 
which have never been surpassed and very rarely 
equalled, and after every visit returned to her social 
duties in New York with a greater assurance and a 
higher bust. Being herself the daughter of a man 
without a grandfather who had lived beyond the decent 
income of an honest member of the Stock Exchange 
to put his children into fashionable schools and allow 
his wife to compete with better provided friends, and 
who had gone, therefore, to a comparatively early 
grave worn to the bone by the struggle, in the usual 


118 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


way, she was as enthusiastic a convert to aristocracy 
as a Baptist to Roman Catholicism. It need not be 
said that she overplayed her part, over-pearled her 
public appearances, and over-worked her social secre¬ 
taries. The wonder of it was that she succeeded finally 
in achieving motherhood even to the extent of a lone 
girl, because her husband had suffered from a lack 
of concentration while she was forever on her feet. 
It had been her fetish to do everything well, and the 
one mutual interest she ever really shared with Van- 
derdyke was his disappointment at her failure to 
provide a son. Her life had been exemplary not 
because of an inherent moral sense, or a lack of temp¬ 
tation, but because she had lived in the belief that the 
eyes of all the world were upon her. According to 
her lights an effective woman, at whose entrance to 
her box at the Metropolitan, cold, erect, mercilessly 
well-dressed, with a face as immovable as one of 
Benda’s masks, the whole house had almost risen to 
its feet. According to the common standards of happi¬ 
ness, contentment and usefulness, as tragic a figure as 
the queer little man to whom she had given less com¬ 
panionship than the llama’s head in his study. 

The aunt, a fine and splendid woman, who had built 
a monument to the memory of the man who had taken 
her everlasting love into his grave, of kindness, per¬ 
sonal service to a hundred worthy charities, and faith. 

All three were to have the joy of holding in their 
arms again the girl who had given them a keen and 
emotional interest in life at a time when they owned 
to the deadly truth of having made very little of it 
themselves. 

And there was Malcolm Fraser. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 119 

There was also Mrs. Beamish with her need of 
generosity. 

A great day, say what you will. 


VI 

“ They have arrived,” said Aunt Honoria. 

Beatrix turned from her dressing table, gave one of 
Pelham’s largest and loudest handkerchiefs to Brownie, 
who had waited for the entrance of Miss Vanderdyke 
in order to enjoy an hysterical breakdown, and went 
over to the kind woman who had seen her through 
every stage of her great performance with such 
exquisite tenderness. 

“ I shall miss you when you go back with mother 
this afternoon,” she said in a low voice. “ I’ve known 
for the first time in my life what a mother really 
means.” 

“ My dear, dear child! ” 

They held each other tight, but not in silence because 
Brownie was giving a faithful imitation of a gurgling 
w r ater tap. There are times in the lives of all small- 
part people when the desire to stand in the full glare 
of the limelight is beyond their power to resist. 

And then Aunt Honoria stood away from Beatrix 
and looked her up and down. A quick glance about 
the ample room had told her of the extraordinary 
pains that her niece had taken over the clothes for 
her re-appearance. The bed was littered with discarded 
garments and there were shoes all over the floor. It 
might have been a dressmaker’s shop after the visit 


120 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


of a profiteer’s wife. The result met with approval, 
though with just a hint of surprise. Miss Vanderdyke 
herself, under the circumstances, would have gone in 
for the several colors of celebration. 

But Beatrix was all in white. Her only colors were 
the ripe yellow of her hair, the grey-blue of her wide 
apart eyes, the delicate rose of her rouge pot and the 
brilliant blood of her lip stick. The imp that was 
perched on her shoulder for the purpose of teaching 
Pelham how little he knew about women had whispered 
“ White for virginity. Remember that you have a 
grudge against your husband.” 

“ Do you like me? ” she asked, knowing the answer. 

And Aunt Honoria’s smile replied that like was not 
the word. 

“ I watched them arrive from my window,” said 
Beatrix. “ I’m not the only one who’s dramatizing 
to-day. Father hopped out of the car like a man just 
injected with monkey glands and the Queen Mother 
issued forth with a graciousness that rivals the sun¬ 
shine, and in spite of his white waistcoat the Major 
might have been a robin in the prime of life.” 

“ I watched them, too. Your mother would always 
rather have lost a pearl than done a tactless thing, and 
so I cannot understand what made her bring Elizabeth 
McKenzie and a total stranger on a day like this.” 

“ Oh,” said Beatrix, with one of her blue-grey looks 
of utter candor, “ I’m afraid Pm rather responsible 
for that. Yes. You know how extraordinary gen¬ 
erous one feels when things have gone too well almost 
to be true? It was in that mood that I wrote to 
mother the other day and suggested the invitation of 
Pelham’s cousin. Don’t you think it’s fair that he 
should have one relation here ? Er . . . Mrs. Beamish 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


121 


is one of the prettiest women I think I’ve ever seen/’ 
And having got that over in her best manner she 
swung back to domestics again. “ As part of a little 
scheme that I have in my head Eve not permitted Pel¬ 
ham to see me this morning, but he was up at dawn, 
Brownie tells me, cutting every flower in the garden. 
He sent up a bouquet with my breakfast large enough 
to fill the bath. And how do you think it has affected 
Malcolm? To verse, the dear old thing. He sent 
me ten lovely lines that he must have sat up all last 
night to write. And here’s Brownie going on like a 
recalcitrant steam heater, while every servant in the 
house has gone completely mad. It might be a wed¬ 
ding, but for baby. He’s caught the excitement too. 
I wish you could have seen his tantrums before break¬ 
fast, and the way he landed his left on his nurse’s face! 
Another King of Beasts, like his father.” 

Which won an almost ribald laugh. Only to Euro¬ 
pean husbands can this term be honestly applied. 

“ Well, now perhaps we’d better go down, or have 
you planned a special entrance ? ” 

“ Yes, I have. Herd everyone into the hall in 
about ten minutes from now and then, suddenly, like 
the star in a play, about whom everyone has been 
saying the nicest things, I’ll appear at the top of the 
stairs, and win a round of applause. It’s awfully silly 
but I’ll never have such a part as this again.” 

“ I hope so,” said Aunt Honoria, “ several times. 
It rather spoils the dramatic effect for your father 
and mother to have seen the boy already, though, as 
a matter of fact they have only seen him twice.” 

“ Don’t you believe it,” said Beatrix. “ Two formal 
visits, yes. But they’ve waited for him, incognito, 


122 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


every afternoon for a fortnight in the path through 
the woods. What do you think of that? ” 

The picture of Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke, of all 
living people, driving surreptitiously to a place where 
the hedge was low, helping each other over and 
waiting for the baby to be wheeled along in his peram¬ 
bulator by the blase woman who probably considered 
that they too should be under the care of a nurse, 
leaped to Aunt Honoria’s eyes. But, somehow, know¬ 
ing her brother and sister-in-law so well and the joy 
that had come to them in this second-hand way, it 
awoke no laughter. On the contrary, it filled her 
with sympathy, — she, who would have given so much 
to have been the grandmother of this unconscious 
miracle with all that it would have meant. 

And she said so in her economical way, and once 
more held the white girl in her arms. And then, some¬ 
what puzzled at her niece’s remark as to the little 
scheme that was in her head and the fact that she had 
kept Pelham away from her that morning, left to greet 
the family, and stage manage the scene. 

And then Brownie seized her chance, dabbing her 
eyes with the large bandana. “ Oh, my dear, my dear,” 
she said, “ I’ve been through everything that’s led up 
to this with you and I wouldn’t have missed one mo¬ 
ment of the worry. You’ve driven me nearly to death 
with your ins-and-outs, but you’ve made me very proud 
of the way you’ve done all this. I’m just an old 
nuisance, on your hands from charity, but I’d be burnt 
at the stake to prove my gratitude, and I love you as 
much as any of them. I wish you everything they’re 
going to wish you, my dear, and more, so much more.” 
And with a most disconcerting humility and deep feel- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 123 

ing she caught up the hand of her only friend and 
pressed it to her lips. 

And when Beatrix succeeded, at last, in having her 
room to herself she stood quite still and looked at the 
imp on her shoulder. “ Well, you little devil,” she 
asked, “ what are you going to do with me now? You 
made me lie myself into the first of all this and then 
left me. And while you’ve been busy with other young 
women I’ve married for love and been a good girl. 
I’ve had great good luck, and proved my man, and 
made my people happy. And I haven’t got one boy on 
my hands, but two, and I mean everything to them 
both. Just at the moment when I ought to be going 
downstairs the proud mother and clinging wife, you 
pop up again. And through you your wee friend May. 
. . . What are you going to do with me now ? — that’s 
what I want to know.” 


VII 

Bored stiff with the crowd and with giving the 
same answers to the same questions, and standing on 
one leg to listen to bursts of separate egotism; with 
having to wear the company smile and break into 
the company laugh, be smacked on the back by the 
Major and feel like knocking him down; with paying 
forced attention to the whispered confidence of Mrs. 
Vanderdyke, who had just reached the whispering 
state, the exuberant chaff of Elizabeth McKenzie 
delivered at the top of her voice, and being led into 
corners by his father-in-law to listen to something of 


124 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


peculiar importance which the old man immediately 
forgot, Pelham was on the point of going up to Beatrix 
in desperation when her slim white figure gleamed at 
the top of the stairs. But for the fear of making an 
ass of himself that has taken the heroics from modern 
life he would have charged through the Phalanx of 
talking women and carried her down in his arms. 
As it was he waved his hand, swallowed the heart that 
rose to his mouth, and backed away from the rush. 

“ Welcome to our City,” cried the Major, as every¬ 
one knew that he would. If it had been raining he 
would have added “ glorious weather for ducks ”, but 
as it was sunny he said, “ well, is this hot enough for 
you?” His whole conversation was made up of ele¬ 
vator cliches, uttered as though they were witty im¬ 
promptus. He wasn’t a Major who had never been 
in the Army for nothing. And Beatrix, like the star 
in a play, made the most of her wonderful part. With 
a flick of a smile at Aunt Honoria she came slowly 
and sweetly downstairs. No stage heroine that she 
had ever seen had been permitted to become a mother. 
That happened after the curtain had fallen. It was 
a hard and fast rule of the game. And so, acting for 
all she was worth, because of the imp on her shoulder, 
she invented an air of young maternity, pride mixed 
with modesty, dignity with shyness, and having given 
the Major her hand to kiss, slipped into the arms of 
her mother. 

“ My darling,” said Mrs. Vanderdyke, though she 
didn’t quite approve of the clothes. A touch of blue 
or even pink would have been so much more appropriate 
to the occasion. She ought to have gone upstairs. She 
had felt this all along. Dear me, dear me! How 
independent the modern girl is, to be sure! 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 125 

And then to her father. “ Well, Daddy, are you 
pleased with me now ? ” 

For the first time for years that nebulous man car¬ 
ried an impulse to a conclusion and actually achieved a 
kiss. “ Pelham Vanderdyke Franklin,” he said, say¬ 
ing aloud the words that had run through his brain 
like an advertisement. 

Whereupon Elizabeth pounced. “ I never thought 
you could do it,” she cried, wittily, as though starting 
an early morning address to the League for Political 
Education on the platform of the Town Hall. “ 'Pon 
my soul, I never did. You absolutely refute all my 
fixed ideas about the flapper, my dear. You really do. 
It’s a record. It’s . . .” 

It didn’t matter that Beatrix had passed along to 
Malcolm. On she went like an open hydrant, gushing 
a torrent of words. 

“ Dear old Mally,” said Beatrix. 

But Malcolm couldn’t speak. 

And then with one hand on Pelham’s arm, she held 
out the other to Mrs. Beamish, whom they had for¬ 
gotten to introduce. “ So kind of you to come,” she 
said, purring. 

“ So good of you to let me,” said Mrs. Beamish, 
with that open smile of hers. 

“ I should have known you anywhere from Pelham’s 
glowing description.” 

“ I didn’t think he knew what I was like.” 

And while Mrs. McKenzie’s torrent went on, Mrs. 
Vanderdyke repaired her make-up, the old man edged 
into the garden to look for Pelham Vanderdyke Frank¬ 
lin, Malcolm went over to Aunt Honoria and the Major 
and Pelham fell into the attitude of a puzzled stork, 


126 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

these two young women stood face to face, sizing 
each other up. 

Honest admiration was what May Beamish felt. 
By Jove, how photography failed! No wonder he had 
eyes for no other girl. 

Pretty? Prettier than a picture. A delicious water 
color. Um, I see. 

Most cordial smiles and the warmest clasp of hands. 

“ We’re going to be friends,” said Mrs. Beamish. 

And Beatrix answered, “ Our wee friend May 
already.” 

Damn! She had read that letter! . . . What a fool 
she’d been to write. 

“ Lunch is served, Madam.” 

But in the general move to the dining loom and 
when everybody’s backs were turned Pelham made a 
dart at his slim and eager girl. Wasn’t he ever to 
have a look in? 

“ Bee — Bee,” — he said, hungry to touch. No 
longer were her feet on a chair. She had done this 
thing superbly. The doctor and the nurses and the 
days and nights of waiting had gone. All in white 
she might have been his bride again. She had come 
back to life and love. 

But up went her hand, and with a little shyness, a 
sort of formality, she held herself away. “ Oh no, 
Pel, please,” she said. 

“Why not? Eve been aching — just aching for 
this.” 

“ Have you, Pel? ” 

“You know I have. What do you mean?” 

But this time it wasn’t her hand that kept him off. 
There was something in her smile . . . she had allowed 
a bubble of disappointment to enter her soul, an infini- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 127 

tesimal sense of grievance. It was Beatrix and not 
the star who stood before him then. 

“What is it?” he asked, knowing nothing about 
women. “ What is it? ” 

“ Shall I tell you now, or wait till after lunch? ” 

“ Tell me now. Good God, what have I done? Tve 
tried to think.” 

There would have been a moment of silence but for 
the distant cackle of Elizabeth McKenzie and the 
silvery laugh of May. 

“You went away. Oh Pel, you went away,” she 
said. 

“But you — you told me to go. You told me 
to go! ” 

“ I know I did, — but you went, and you shouldn’t 
have gone.” 

And she dropped her hand and turned away, and 
took the imp into lunch on her shoulder. 






PART IV 


I 

Sitting with her father on her right and the Major 
on her left, with the utterly dumbfounded Pelham 
opposite between Mrs. Vanderdyke and Elizabeth Mc¬ 
Kenzie, Beatrix conducted through her never flagging 
line of hostess talk a zigzag of thought which wound 
among smiling meadows like the Thames. 

Great cheerfulness prevailed. The cook had made 
up her mind not only that everyone must be hungry 
but that everything should constitute a record in her 
culinary efforts. Good wine accompanied her admir¬ 
able handiwork. As though with a premonition of 
that ridiculous and drink-encouraging law which has 
also succeeded in creating another ring of robbers 
Pelham’s father had devoted much care and money to 
his cellar. The praiseworthy result of this was that 
if the present owner of the house lived to a hundred, 
— at the moment he wished that he was dead — he 
would even then be able to remind his luckless friends 
of what ancient and long forgotten hospitality had 
been like, — always assuming that the Bolshevists who 
have been brought to life by Prohibition were not able, 
in the meantime, to break into the house and help 
themselves to what the Government could not prevent 
them from buying from other countries but made no 
effort to provide the money with which they could 
do so. 


130 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


The long low-ceilinged room with its old oak beams 
and Jacobean furniture, its nice collection of prints 
and china, pewter and brass, had never looked more 
cheery or more homelike. Everywhere flowers wel¬ 
comed the return of Beatrix. 

Watching the expert way in which May Beamish 
drew Malcolm on to air his views and darted quick 
examining looks at Pelham, — she had been married 
long enough to recognize the rift within the Franklin 
lute — Beatrix alternated between her private con¬ 
versation and public talk. “ Oh, yes, of course, Daddy. 
He shall be brought down immediately after lunch . . . 
Um, queer things, girls. Nobody understands us and 
I don’t believe many of us really understand ourselves. 
. . . No, mother. We haven’t definitely decided how 
long we shall remain here. Probably till the middle of 
June and then a cruise. Pelham has views on the 
subject. . . . Eve been hurt, — even if the bruise is 
so small that it couldn’t be found with a microscope. 
I know it’s unfair and unjust to put it down to Pel¬ 
ham and make him pay. And I don't know why Pm 
going to do it, but I am. It’s the girl of me that I 
was born with . . . My dear Uncle, I like to see you 
eat. Everything’s here for you to punish. Chateau 
Lafitte, 1906 , I think. Oh, was that a good year? I’m 
so glad. . . . When he should have been calm and 
strong, at the time when I needed him most, he left 
me, that’s the point. I know I told him to go. I know 
it’s my fault that he went. I know it’s utterly illogical 
to carry it all through this wonderful dream and it’s 
beastly cruel to poor old Pel, but I’m going to do it 
because it is illogical. That’s us. That’s girl. . . . 
All out of the garden, Cousin Elizabeth. Everything 
grows well here. I wish you could have seen the lilac. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 131 

. . . There won’t be any satisfaction in my life what¬ 
ever, never mind how completely happy I really am, 
until I’ve made him suffer a little for what I made 
myself suffer a little. So that’s that. There isn’t an 
imp on my shoulder. That’s the excuse I’ve got to 
make for a little orgy of mischief. There isn’t an 
imp. It’s me. It’s the odd part of the girl of me 
which nobody understands. ... I don’t know your 
English country very well. You know how Americans 
rush through. Is it? Like Buckinghamshire? Really. 
That’s what Malcolm says. ... If I could be dead 
honest, and if I could I shouldn’t be a girl, I should 
tell myself that I’m in this tricky mood to bring out 
all the man of Pel. It’s mermaid stuff. It’s holding 
him off to draw him on. It’s teasing. If he’d said I’ll 
see you hanged before I leave you, and played the 
King of Beasts, there wouldn’t have been any rankle 
at all. I’d have adored to be disobeyed. Now I’m 
out to make him spank me, “ treat me rough ” and 
give me a thrill. I’m back again and full of devil. 
I want Romance after being practical so long. I 
want to be pre-historic. I want to be mastered with a 
huge stone ax and shoutings. I want to be gripped 
and flung. Oh, it’s so easy if he only knew! Girl, 
just girl. Why don’t they teach men this? . . . Lunch 
on Sunday? I should love to, Daddy. Not a second 
later than one. . . . If he gets an inspiration before 
to-night, or a hint from Aunt Honoria who may have 
sensed the game I’m playing, I shall be as right as 
rain to-morrow, and what I call my imp will go. Mean¬ 
time, in spite of my preponderance of commonsense, 
I shall put him through it with every ingenious bit-of 
me. And, by Jove, yes! I’ll call up Alec Greenwood 
and make him come and stay. Jealousy’s always 


132 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


useful. He knows that boy was following me about 
and Eve never told him exactly how things stood. 
Alec’s objectionably young too. And Pelham has 
a birthday coming that he hopes he won't remember. 
. . . You beast! ” 

And on she went, analysing, condemning, excusing, 
inventing, but never swerving from her rather dan¬ 
gerous plan. It was all, as she told herself, girl. Girl 
the unfathomable, sensitive, wayward, contradictory, 
mischievous, and sometimes delicious creature for 
whom a man will sell his hopes of Heaven, and pawn 
his peace of mind; as queer as the weather and as 
difficult to prophesy about. One careless or would-be 
humorous word can call up a cloud that presently will 
bring about an unexpected burst of rain, while one 
that is angry and even brutal in the middle of low¬ 
ering unsettled weather and instantly the sky is clear 
and out comes the sun. They are born with a hankering 
for something that they don’t know how to define and 
which no man, even as a lover, can ever provide them 
with. They are always hunting for the impossible 
perfection, the perfect happiness, and they are obliged 
to come out of youth either with make-believe or make¬ 
shift. Their feeling and desire for romance, whatever 
that may be, — beauty, tenderness, fidelity, perhaps, 
who knows ? — leads them into accepting substitutes 
in their hurry to obtain it and then follows, according 
to their strength of character or capacity for martyr¬ 
dom, a lifetime to make the best of it. The sort of 
blow that would cripple a man puts them into regal 
health, while the touch of a finger on a sensitive spot 
and the agony stops their hearts. They need enthusi¬ 
asm as a flower needs water and without enjoyment 
they will wither up. They can stand mere physical 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


133 

pain with infinitely more courage and endurance than 
a man, but give them mental pain, — disillusion, a 
lack of sympathy, a glowering face, no admiration, — 
and they wilt into a decline. A man may become a 
master of art, of war, of science and of men, but he 
can never really understand a girl. 


II 

And after lunch the boy was brought down to be 
adored. 

Pelham Vanderdyke Franklin was, of course, like 
every other baby of the same age, unique in the annals 
of babies. The way he sat on the nurse’s brawny arm, 
looked from face to face with round astonished eyes, 
moved the pudgy fingers of his dimpled hands, screwed 
up his toes when people came too close, and opened his 
mouth in a burst of silent laughter when the Major, 
lost to all sense of dignity, made a Matabele of himself 
and conducted a conversation in the language of klicks, 
was, without the slightest doubt, Wonderful. What 
intelligence, what humor, what amazing self-posses¬ 
sion, what tact! And the delicate suggestion of eye¬ 
brows and of down upon the ivory dome! How 
exactly like his mother. Yes, but there’s his father’s 
nose. And, mark you, already there’s the old Dutch 
Vanderdyke pride about the chin. Good bone, my boy, 
and if you notice the length of line from the ankle 
to the knee every indication of growing into as tall 
a man as his father. Or even taller. Yes, even 
taller. And look at those wrists for polo and that eye 


134 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


for a gun. And feel those little bumps behind the 
ears. Music! And languages in the cut of the jaw. 
. . . “ and, oh God, what will my little man make of 
himself when he emerges from being made?” 

And as he looked at all those different faces with 
that wide blank stare, did he do his share of speculation 
and make a summing up? Did he ask himself if Mrs. 
Vanderdyke really imagined that she could play Canute 
with age with all that dye and paint and massage and 
the self-inflicted penalties that they spelt? If old 
man Vanderdyke still believed that he could not have 
put up a fight against inheritance and cut his way to 
life? Did he ask himself why the Major had allowed 
that bulge below his waistcoat, and Mrs. McKenzie 
that easily interpreted story of unfulfilment that could 
be heard beneath her noise ? Why the whitehaired lady 
stood with her hand upon her breast, the ugly man in 
goggles seemed unhappy and out of touch, and why 
the tiny lady with the flower face was looking with¬ 
out the slightest friendliness clean through his head? 
And why the tall man with the small moustache imi¬ 
tated a puzzled stork and hardly looked at him at all? 
He didn’t have to ask himself about the warm-eyed 
girl with the tender hands that did exactly what was 
right. He knew. Of course he knew. She belonged 
to him. And being Wonderful the betting is that he 
knew everything else as well, even that May Beamish 
was looking through his head into a problematical 
future in which Vanderdykes and Franklins stood on 
very different ground. But what he didn’t know, 
Wonderful as he was, was what nobody had the hum¬ 
bleness to see, even those who dared to face the 
inexorable fact that the future is the past entered 
through the same old gate; though all the while there 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 135 

is another gate, the key to which, bearing the name of 
Christ, is brotherhood. 

And then, suddenly, P. V. Franklin demanded sleep, 
the round eyes blinked, the pudgy hands relaxed, panic 
prevailed, and a dozen suggestions were flung about, 
while Beatrix, who did everything that was right, 
took him in her arms, with his face against her neck; 
carried him out to the perambulator, and placed him 
comfortably in. And when she kissed him he opened 
his eyes before sleep completely wiped out grimacing 
faces and flicking watch lids and funny noises and 
gave her a look of blind and perfect faith that pinned 
upon her breast the golden cross of the Legion of 
Motherhood. 

No one was in the hall when she went back except 
your wee friend May, who was going to suggest a 
stroll to Pelham and was waiting while he had gone 
to fetch his pipe. There was nothing new or grotesque 
about her clothes; no hanging, swaying things, nor 
that atrocious belt lowered to the point of indiscretion 
that gives a woman the appearance of having small 
and stumpy legs on an elephantine trunk; no excessive 
shortness of skirt that is equally ugly, and often very 
tragic. She was so well dressed that one didn’t notice 
what she had on. Her extraordinary prettiness was 
not killed by an atrocious frame. She looked almost 
too young to be out alone. 

Mrs. Vanderdyke had withdrawn to the drawing¬ 
room for restoration. Elizabeth had been edged by 
Aunt Honoria into the garden, where there was less 
echo in her voice. The Major had gone with Malcolm 
to see the horses and to tell some stories more appropri¬ 
ate to fish. And so Beatrix bore down upon the 


136 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Beamish with her most charming hostess smile. This 
was exactly what she wanted. 

“ Sit down and have a talk,” she said, touching May 
rather sweetly on the arm. “ Shall we ? ” 

What the deuce? These grey-blue girls, — she 
knew them. This didn’t go with the pre-lunch attitude, 
when the sword had rattled for just a second. “If 
it won’t bore you,” she replied. 

“Heavens, no!” said Beatrix. “I’m interested in 
everything.” She made a long arm for a box of 
cigarettes and held it out with camaraderie. 

“ Oh, thanks, so much.” This interested arid friendly 
tone seemed to hide no guile? There was nothing 
overdone about it, apparently. Could it be that she 
had simply been told about the letter? After all, our 
wee friend May, she’d said, as though she’d joined 
her husband in the bond. Um . . . Well, in any 
case, was it better to go out with a more than ever 
elusive man, if she could get him to come, which was 
doubtful, than stay and put in good work with the wife 
and angle for the vital invitation? 

“ But don’t let me keep you,” said Beatrix, getting 
the other’s feeling of irresolution, “ if you’ve anything 
better to do.” 

May was a worker. The devil of it was that she 
couldn’t afford to lose a customer. “ Whatever I had 
to do I’d scratch,” she said, sitting down, “ to hear 
you talk.” 

“ Ah, how Elizabethan.” And Beatrix put a cushion 
behind the little soul and a chair in place for herself. 
It was a foot, two feet, perhaps, nearer than casual 
acquaintanceship used. “ Well, — and how do you 
like us ? ” 

“ Awfully, — if you mean you and your husband, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


137 


and it’s inspiring to find a married couple so truly 
happy, I can tell you; if Americans generally, I like 
everyone I’ve met.” 

“ That was very able,” said Beatrix. “ Very.” 

The laugh was catching. Phew, these grey-blue 
girls! “ But, after all, what did you expect me to 

say?” 

“ I didn’t expect. I didn’t even worry to hope. I 
knew that I could rely on your saying something really 
good because — well, you look like that.” 

A bow, a warming smile, but a query that persisted. 
“ That still makes me want to ask you how you 
like me? ” 

Without a second’s hesitation, and with an enthusi¬ 
asm that was thoroughly sincere, Beatrix answered. 
“ I think you’re quite the prettiest thing,” she said, 
“ that I’ve ever seen in my life.” 

Then she hadn't read that letter ... or had she? 
May could guarantee to tackle any sort of man, but 

when it came to girls, and this girl- However, 

if she knew the game she was a generous opponent, 
and would drop her weapon if the cause of fight were 
frankly explained. And so May stripped herself of 
armor and stood stark, your wee friend May, the 
girl who had nothing to hide. “ Then you’re the only 
one who does,” she said, “ in this house.” 

“ Oh, really? What do you mean? ” The sudden 
flash of nakedness, so to speak, had startled Beatrix 
a little. 

May made herself perfectly comfortable, hitched 
the cushion, snuggled into the chair. She was off on 
an inspiration. It was not a fight but murder if one 
of the parties flung every weapon away. “ Well,” 
she said, pushing down the fourth wall all at once, 



138 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ I used every known female trick on the Galatea to 
make your husband think as you do, — I had a won¬ 
derful chance, as you know, — but I might just as 
well have been his sister. That’s an extraordinary 
man of yours, Mrs. Franklin. There was I, with 
nothing against me but Mrs. McKenzie, bottled up on 
a yacht with lots of nice clothes and every intention of 
having a good time, the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen, 
as, of course, I know, and to my utter astonishment I 
made no more impression than a signet ring on frozen 
sealing wax. And, by Jove, I did everything I knew. 
And there was water everywhere, which somehow is 
always supposed to help, long days with nothing to 
distract, a dear good lady with an overflow of talk, 
and an absent wife about — it almost sounds like a 
fairy tale — to have a baby. What could be more 
perfect? But in the end, if he’d been put through an 
examination, he couldn’t have answered a single ques¬ 
tion as to what I’m like. A frightful blow to any 
woman’s vanity, — and I have lots. And even when 
I went to the trouble to write a friendly letter to thank 
him for the cruise, so utterly had I failed that not a 
line did I get in reply. It was a nice little note, too, 
I thought. Didn’t you? ” 

“ Quite a nice little note,” said Beatrix breathlessly. 
“ How rude of him not to answer.” 

“ But, of course, I now know why.” And the wide 
gesture of admiration was Oriental in its eloquence. 

Which Beatrix accepted and pooh-poohed. . . . 
Clever? She should think so. Dear old Pel. He 
was an extraordinary man not to have been a little 
affected by this experienced purring puss. But if 
she imagined that this ingenious frankness could wipe 
out the S.O.S. for money that was written between 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


139 


the lines of the nice little note, she was making an 
almost German error of psychology. Charity Beatrix 
was wholly in favor of, but for gold-digging she had 
no sympathy at all, especially when the mine bore the 
name of her husband. She wasn’t certain, but every¬ 
thing pointed to the fact that the Beamish was working 
to be so much liked as to achieve an invitation to come 
and have another go at Pelham. Otherwise why set 
out to prove that she had utterly failed to attract? 
Now for some fun, then. 

“ How much longer are you going to be with Cousin 
Elizabeth, wee friend?” she asked. 

Up went those small round shoulders in a shrug. 
“ She’s too kind, but out of common decency, I must 
pass on soon. Where to go, — that’s the point. In a 
new world all alone. I’m simply longing for the 
country.” 

“ Yes,” said Beatrix. “ I was wondering how you 
can stand the city in this weather. It’s very lovely 
here.” 

“ Yes, a sweet place. Home, in every sense of the 
word. Something that I’ve — I’ve never had. How¬ 
ever,” — and then came the plucky smile, the brave tilt 
of the small round chin, — “ some of us must be the 
Also-rans. . . . Golf near here?” 

“ I think it’s the best course we’ve got in America. 
Pelham said you play a fine game, so you’d like it’s 
being difficult.” 

“ Ra-ther. I was just as good as born in a bunker.” 

“ The riding’s excellent, too, and there’s tennis, of 
course.” 

“Water near for bathing?” It wasn’t a sine qua 
non, but it was just as well to know. 

Beatrix was sorry about that. “No, not very near, 


140 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


and then not good, I’m afraid. But there’s a splendid 
bathing pool in the garden that we use all the time.” 

“Ah,” said May, “how well you do things here.” 
A bathing pool sounded all right for want of anything 
better. Nice, in fact. Undress in the house, and all 
that. Hot water and a drink of sorts. Very jolly. 

“ Also we’re frightfully keen on bridge. And 
according to Pelham you’re a second Mrs. Elwell.” 

May’s laugh rang among the rafters. “ Did he 
really notice that? ” 

“ Also,” added Beatrix, like a child building a tower 
of bricks for the joy of making it crash, “ we’ve a 
bowling alley for wet days and an English billiard 
table.” 

“ Oh, pills. How topping.” Would she have to 
come by train or could she run to a hired car ? 

Malcolm came and stood at the door. In passing the 
open window he had caught a look in Beatrix’s eye 
that called him urgently in. And so Beatrix rose and 
pushed her chair back. Icy cordiality that would have 
done the greatest credit to the wife of a born Ambassa¬ 
dor had taken the place, with a flick, of her former 
breezy manner. “ Well,” she said, “ if you’re going 
to be here some autumn it would give us so much 
pleasure if you could spare us several days.” 

“ In other words, if you’re passing, pass,” thought 
May, staggering to the ropes. Oh, these grey-blue 
girls. 

“ Will you excuse me for a moment, Mrs. 
Beamish? ” 

“ Oh, please.” For a week, a year, a lifetime. She 
didn’t care. 

“ Oh, Mally.” And when Beatrix, greatly surprised 
to see the dear old thing, joined him at the door, her 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 141 

eyes were gleaming and there was triumph in her 
smile. 

This was probably only the first of a series of 
rounds, — Your wee friend May was a stayer, she 
could tell — but she had taken that on points, at any 
rate. 

Whew, but it was good to be in the running again! 


Ill 

Malcolm knew that smile. It made him anxious. 
But he had to wait until he had been towed to what 
was called the little den before he could put the ques¬ 
tion. And then it came. 

“ What the mischief have you been up to? ” 

“ Oh, just that,” she said, and had her laugh out. 
And while she repaired the inevitable damage in front 
of the mirror she let him in to all that she considered 
he ought to know. “ I’m on my feet again, Mally, 
and I’ve just been seeing if Tve lost the muscles of my 
calves. Girling, let’s call it. It’s a most descriptive and 
self-conscious word. I’m still most terrifyingly young, 
I find.” 

“ Yes, I’ve noticed that,” said Malcolm, who had 
seen the expression on Pelham’s face during and after 
lunch, and in passing his room a few moments ago 
had heard him stumping up and down, like a sentry, 
on guard against his temper. Why, on such a day, — 
when he had been released from waiting? He hoped 
to God that neither of these two was going off on one 



142 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


of those abrupt and foolish tangents that give the 
luckiest marriage a fatal jar. 

But he had only just arranged himself in the proper 
attitude to say so when Beatrice raised an unrelenting 
hand. “ Don’t get up in the pulpit, dear old thing,” 
she said. “ I’m too new to life for lectures, not long 
enough out of doing my duty to be repressed. Let me 
alone, let me work this thing out of my system, and the 
flag of peace shall float over this house to-morrow. 
Otherwise, — ” 

“ I’m down,” said Malcolm, in a panic. “ I won’t 
even open my mouth.” 

She went over to him, contradictory always, and put 
her hand on his shoulder. “ Oh, yes, you will, Mally. 
I’ve brought you in to tell me several things I want 
to hear you say. When everyone else had given me 
up and I knew they were perfectly right, you backed 
me to come through, didn’t you? Well, have I lived 
up to your faith? ” 

“ My dear,” he said, “ of course you have. I always 
knew you would. You’ve only to look at your people 
and the young wonder that we’ve seen.” 

“ He is wonderful, isn’t he? ” 

“ There never was anything so wonderful.” 

“ Oh, Mally, what can I say about him and what 
he means to me? I haven’t a word to say. I can’t 
even think the proper things, it’s all so wonderful. 
I try and try, and stand quite still with my eyes shut, 
or hold him in my arms and hang upon his smile, — 
it’s like a song that needs no words, the melody sings 
them all.” 

“ The song of the Madonna. It’s never been put 
to words. There isn’t a language simple enough, pas¬ 
sionate enough, glad and sad enough to fit the tune.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


143 


“ Go on like that. I need it.” But, uncannily wise, 
she didn’t let him go on. 

She stopped him. There was a note in his voice 
that warned her that he was reaching for his cassock, 
that he was going to take advantage of her appeal for 
praise to ask her what the dickens she had done to Pel. 
She didn’t want, just then, to be told about the danger 
of trifling. She knew it. She didn’t require any 
grave words about marriage and the difficult thing 
it was. She could read him a better sermon than he 
could make after all those days and nights that she’d 
been through. She could burst into a passionate appeal 
for marriage as an institution and for the retention 
in it of loyalty, give and take, humor that is so vitally 
necessary, and love, without which it is a tragedy, 
because she and Pelham had proved its beauty and its 
blessedness. She was bent on being foolish, out on 
a kind of holiday bat. She was just going to become 
the old Beatrix again as a sort of reward for her 
excellence, to let the girl in her go once more, for the 
last time, for the Romance of the thing. Good 
Heavens, it was natural enough. 

And so she planted a kiss on his cheek and waved 
her hand and broke away. She wanted to be mastered 
with a huge stone axe and shoutings. She wanted to 
be gripped and flung. She was back again and full 
of devil. It’s only a step from ultra-civilization to the 
prehistoric. 

And because Malcolm knew that wave of the hand 
his anxiety returned. 

“ I’m a beast,” she said, with a laugh, took up the 
telephone and asked for Alec Greenwood’s number. 
He wasn’t in at the moment. Was that a sign for her 
to drop that ingenious form of torture? . . . He’d 


144 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


only gone out to try a new machine, a racing car? 
“ Oh, well, will you tell Mr. Greenwood that Mrs. 
Pelham Franklin will be very glad if he will drive over 
when he gets back and bring his things for a few days’ 
stay? ” 

“ Greenwood? ” 

“ Why shoot the word at me like that? ” she asked, 
sitting on the table and swinging her legs. 

“ Alec Greenwood? ” 

“ Nice boy. You remember him, I see.” 

“ I remember that he’s anything but a nice boy. 
Unholy young waster, that’s what he is. A red rag 
to a bull to Pelham.” 

“ I know, dear Mally. That’s why I want him 
here.” 

He knew that he had known that smile and those 
cheeky rippling fingers. “ Don’t do it,” he said, going 
over to her, quickly. “ Today too. Don’t do it. 
Tomorrow, any future time, but not today. Pm not 
anywhere near a pulpit, but I ask you not to, Bee. 
You’ve already said something to Pel that’s knocked 
the stuffing out of him, — or you haven’t said some¬ 
thing, I don’t know. And the poor devil’s been waiting 
for today. What the mischief are you up to? ” 

“ Just that. I told you, Mally.” 

“ But — Greenwood! Pel has a complex about 
Greenwood. It’s impish, that’s what it is.” 

She laughed again. “ When did you learn about 
girls? ” 

“ I don’t care what happens to me,” he said, and 
deliberately reached for the damned cassock. “You 
can kick me out for lecturing and send me home to my 
parrot, but I’m going to argue like Hell against this.” 

“ Oh, well,” sighed Beatrix. “ Oh, well! ” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


145 


And in spite of what was so irritating a form of 
resignation, a get on with it and fling it off your chest 
tone, you’ll be lucky if I listen, he took his courage 
in both hands. It required a bit of doing. This girl, 
whom he loved to the end of loving. . . . 

“ Look here,” he said. “ I had a talk with Pel last 
night. I understand exactly what his mood is. If I 
were standing in his shoes today mine would be the 
same. You’ve done this thing to perfection through 
all its stages. But hasn’t he? You’ve not been all 
alone in this, you know. The tendency is to think 
that a man has nothing to do but look on or play 
about, when his wife goes through all this. Some 
men may be made like that, I don’t envy them if they 
are, but not Pel. He’s been through every minute 
phase of sensitive feeling, with all the agony as well 
as joy. And if you’ve come down today to a new 
beginning he has too. It’s a touch and go moment 
in both your lives, my dear, in the life of marriage. 
It’s a cross-road. Hurt his pride, belittle his share in 
this, let him think that now you’ve got the baby he’s 
the second fiddle, in fact trifle and play the fool with 
a delicate and highstrung imagination, convalescent 
after all its pains and anticipations, and you may break 
the tiny thread that binds a marriage. For God’s 
sake, don’t do that just to indulge in a temperamental 
spree. If all this means nothing but a lone man’s 
incoherence, does it mean anything that I have faith 
in you? 

“Anything? Everything,” she answered. “I wish 
you hadn’t thought of saying that.” And she slid off 
the table, went over to the window and stood there 
with her hands behind her back. 

Had he won? Had he been inspired to say any- 


146 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


thing that touched the note of mercy in her soul? 
And it was mercy that he’d had to touch because, in 
marriage, new, like this one, made in love, it was the 
woman who had the power to hurt. What is a man’s 
vanity but the coating round his heart? 

All that he had said was good, and she agreed 
with it. And the wind up of his appeal shook her 
scheme. No one, not her people, not Aunt Honoria, 
certainly not Brownie, not even Pelham knew her so 
well as Malcolm did. She would be led a thousand 
miles by half a kindness but a battering ram couldn’t 
push her the eighth of an inch. All the same . . . 
there was that niggling little grudge, that bubble of 
disappointment, that infinitesimal sense of grievance. 
He had gone away at the moment when she had needed 
him most. She had sent him, perfectly true, but he 
had left her. Why shouldn’t she pay him out a little 
— it was really only a game. It was only the girl in 
her that was leading up to romance. She only wanted 
to see what Pelham was made of. He’d enjoy it all as 
much as she. She wouldn’t be terrifyingly young 
forever. And wasn’t the great day hers as well as 
his? Malcolm, now that she came to think of it, 
had argued only in favour of Pelham, although he’d 
praised her for the way that she’d come through. 
Well, of all the . . . 

Seizing upon this fatal error which provided her 
with just the excuse that she needed, she wheeled 
round and spoke. “ Thank you, dear old Mally,” she 
said gravely. “ I shall memorize your sermon for 
future use. One of these days you must write a book 
on marriage. A bachelor always sees the best of the 
game. And now I think we ought to go and spread 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 147 

ourselves among the family. There’ll be disgruntled 
faces if we don’t.” 

And out she went, and there was something in her 
smile . . . 


IV 


As to Greenwood. 

According to Malcolm, generally inclined to be very 
kindly in his criticisms of young men, here was a most 
unholy waster, about whom Pelham had a complex, 
because he was young and was still in love with 
Beatrix. 

There are many definitions of this drastic term, 
and nearly all of them are wrong. The one that gets 
nearest to accuracy, perhaps, is that which interprets 
the average unholy waster as a youth born several 
centuries late, or fifty years in advance of his time. 
Greenwood belonged, though Malcolm might never: 
surmount his fixed idea and admit it, to the born late 
type, and was, therefore, looked at and judged by the 
modern point of view an impossible person, a danger 
to the community, with several criminal tendencies 
which argued the use of a strait-jacket or deporta¬ 
tion to the wilds of Africa, where he could paint 
himself into a resemblance to a barber’s pole, dance 
himself into a condition of unbelievable ecstasy under 
the hideous influence of gin and Tom-Tom, and occupy 
whatever spare time was left over in fighting, — all of 
which, primeval as it sounds, rather aptly described 
what had been found much nearer the heart of things 


148 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


than the wilds of Africa during the four years of the 
war. By his astonished parents, his outraged school¬ 
masters, the unimaginative people at his university 
and every policeman on the road he was completely 
misunderstood. Which was natural. 

From the age of four he barked the shins and broke 
the hearts of all the nurses who entered the parental 
house with as much sanity as they evet have, and left 
it, very quickly, almost mad. A very pretty boy with 
the curly hair and beatific smile of a Rubens angel, 
old world grace and easy Embassy manners, he won the 
confidence of all women as easily as a financial gold- 
brick merchant, or a Jewish dealer in fake antiques. 
He lied with a Washington expression, looked him¬ 
self out of evidence that would have meant the Black 
Cap to boys with less wide eyes, and had as much 
natural liking for hot water as a dipsomaniac in a 
Turkish bath. He was a poker sharp at ten, a con¬ 
noisseur of cigars and wine at thirteen, and a regular 
attendant at boxing matches and an intimate friend 
of racing touts long before he used a razor. By which 
period in an already checkered career he had been 
expelled from several schools because of an inherent 
disability to conform to law and order, had had large 
bills paid by a most bewildered father, and gone in 
and out of several love episodes with a quite uninjured 
heart. He had thrived on trouble and had grown more 
and more good-looking, bland and charming on punish¬ 
ment. He had even made several notable disappear¬ 
ances which had altogether stultified the well-known 
efficiency of the police. He had danced in a San 
Francisco cabaret during one of them with a partner 
who had kicked her way out of a revue. He had 
worked an elevator in the Ritz Hotel in Montreal 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


149 


during another, doing great credit to the swagger 
uniform. And on each occasion he had wound up 
these youthful and high-spirited adventures with a 
touching impersonation of the prodigal son. A doting 
mother made these returns very dramatic and enjoy¬ 
able. And all because he had been born out of the 
period in which he would have been the subject of 
ballads, the hero of damsels in distress and trouba¬ 
dours, worn armor, tilted at fellow knights and 
windmills, followed a king into exile, covered himself 
with blood and glory on famous battlefields and finally 
died a gallant death in the flower of his youth and 
been put to rest beneath a stone effigy in an Abbey. 
Poor lad! He had been designated for tins. 

Then had come the war, the Great Adventure. 

Squeezed into Yale and just about to be hurled out 
he was eighteen on the fatal day that was so glorious 
to him. Without a moment’s hesitation, or a postcard 
to his home, he sold his cuff links and his studs, all his 
imported suits and boots and his very decorative col¬ 
lection of French water-colors and headed straight for 
Canada, and in the second contingent of the C.E.F. 
sailed with three stripes. The rest was easy. Com¬ 
missioned for conspicuous bravery in the field he im¬ 
mediately exchanged into the Flying Corps, found 
himself in an element where there are no speed limits 
and motor cops, school-masters and kill-joy fanatics 
and passed from glory to glory, from hospital to hos¬ 
pital, from decoration to decoration. He had returned 
to knighthood and the merry joust. He had flown 
clean back into his rightful place in history. And as 
to the necessary damsels in distress, these he found, 
during the brief leaves that he invariably made elastic, 
in Piccadilly and the Rue de Rivoli. A.P.M.’s became 


150 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


his windmills and his troubadours were on the Music 
Halls. And for some reason or other which no one 
can explain, the bullet on which his name was certainly 
engraved, — a nom de guerre as a matter of fact — 
was never fired. Among the last to be demobbed and 
demoralized he found himself a Major on the steps of 
Cox’s Bank with enough medals to melt into a shell 
case. 

And then, what? 

First the fatted calf, this time very fat, served with 
hero worship sauce and adulation. “ Did you hear 
about my son Alec? A Major in the British service, 
Flying Corps. An ace, with every decoration. Won¬ 
derful, yes indeed. What’s he doing now? Well 
. . Well, everything, absolutely everything, except 
work. Work? Rest, holiday, change of scene, amuse¬ 
ment, all the money that was going, the best clothes, 
the fattest cigars, the prettiest girls, — hadn’t he 
earned the right to these? It was an increasingly 
difficult question to answer, that “ what’s he doing 
now ? ” But very soon everybody knew. Alec, better 
looking than ever, better dressed than ever, with a 
smarter car than anyone and a far more noticeable 
girl, painted New York red like a finished artist. It 
was “ here comes dear old Alec ”, with every hanger- 
on and chorus-girl as well as every debutante and every 
tuft-hunting matron. Major Alec Greenwood, for 
much longer than is usual, — one winter is the limit as 
rule and then you’re dead — was the lion of every 
party, and he roared like any sucking dove to the 
prettiest daughters. Everyone, including, of course, 
his parents, paid for his medals. 

But his delightful charm of manner, his endless 
fund of anecdote, his gift of accepting hospitality and 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


151 


helping himself without the tiresome formality of 
being asked, his boundless energy and high-spirits, his 
perfect dancing, his faultless bridge, his splendid ten¬ 
nis, his plus-one golf, and above all his habit of 
laughter, made a most unusual screen to hide the dear 
old Alec that he’d become. The world revolved round 
Alec Greenwood, smart Alec as disagreeable people 
called him now. And it must be confessed that he 
brought a lack of scruple to the point where it branched 
off on the Sing Sing road. His home was simply 
the door that fitted his permanent latch-key, though, 
when he happened to meet her, he was very sweet to 
his mother. He was full of praise and wonder at the 
way his father worked. A good old thing, his father, 
whom he held in great esteem. Probably the most 
successful lawyer in New York, old boy, and, by Jove, 
the father of Alec Greenwood. Eh? A burst of 
laughter and another drink. 

It was at this stage of his career that he met 
Beatrix. One of his respectable evenings, at the Col¬ 
ony Club. At the very sight of her as she entered the 
ballroom with Aunt Honoria and caught his eye on 
her sophisticated gaze-round of inspection, he crashed. 
For the first time in his life he forgot that he was 
Alec, and something went clean through that pachyder¬ 
matous hide to his heart. Every night for a month 
he achieved her presence, — opera, dance; theatre, 
dance; horse-show, dance; Midnight frolic, dance; din¬ 
ner, dance. The giddy round. She drew him like a 
magnet, reduced him to miraculous humility, filled his 
sleep with poetry and music, put him on his feet on 
solid earth. She was the damsel in distress, although 
there was not a girl on earth farther away from such a 
state; the golden girl for whom he had flung himself 


152 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


at armored knights and died. He became Sir Alex¬ 
ander de Greenwoode in a flash. And she liked him 
and encouraged him and flirted with him, was cold and 
kind; was even a little touched at being the one to 
bring this notorious ace down with such a clatter. 
And just for that ecstatic month he lived in dreams 
and was a stranger to his gang. Then came gossip, 
the talk about the visits to York’s studio, the dis¬ 
closure of the secret marriage to Pelham Franklin and 
Alec, though with the memory of having been steeped 
in a poem, went straight back into the air. 

“ Unholy young waster, that's what he is,” said 
Malcolm, and he was wrong. Born late, that’s what 
he really was, a man who had come to life among 
motor cars and baseball stadiums instead of capari¬ 
soned horses and tourney grounds for knights. 

That was Greenwood. 


V 

And then there was all the business of the family 
departure, — the Yanderdyke family departure; the 
old man, who was really in the prime of life, straining 
every nerve and everybody’s patience to leave at a cer¬ 
tain minute in order to reach home at a certain minute, 
when all the while he knew as well as everybody else 
did that the market value of his minute was as low as 
that of the German mark. 

The car had been ordered for twenty minutes past 
five, and both the chauffeur and the gentleman of no 
occupation who broke the gentle monotony of being 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


153 


driven about by condescending to open the door of the 
car, knew better than to be a second late. But at five 
o’clock the fuss began. First there was the inevitable 
comparing of watches. Then the “ my dear, don’t you 
think you ought to go and get ready now?” Then 
the commencement of the short-haired terrier move¬ 
ments, — from the footman with the coat and hat to 
the foot of the stairs and back; from the clock on the 
hall mantelpiece to the one in the library, and from the 
Major’s watch via the foot of the stairs to the footman 
with the coat and hat; from that implacable man to 
Mrs. Vanderdyke, and the repetition of “ My dear, 
don’t you think you ought to go and get ready now ? ” 
and on to Aunt Honoria, Mrs. McKenzie, Mrs. Beam¬ 
ish and the Major’s watch, back to the clock on the 
hall mantelpiece, the one in the library, and via the 
footman with the coat and hat to the foot of the stairs. 
The compelling touch on the elbow, the pointing finger 
to the face of the watch, the anxious and hastening 
smile, the little run to the window, the listening ear, 
the devil’s tatoo on the tops of tables and the backs of 
chairs, the reminding cough, the humming of a long 
dead march. Then the subtle alteration of the formula 
to “ My dear, I think you ought to get ready now ”, to 
“ My dear, you really must get ready now ”, to “ My 
dear, do please go and get ready now ”, and finally to 
“ My dear, we shall be terribly late.” And, at last, 
the transference of terrier movements from the foot¬ 
man who no longer held the coat and hat, the clocks on 
the hall mantelpiece and the library table, the foot of 
the stairs and the various places where the several com¬ 
pletely indifferent women were determined to have the 
last word to the doorstep, the gravel drive, and round 
and round the car. Oh, my God, these meaning- 


154 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

lessly punctual men, — and these determined last word 
women. 

Mrs. Vanderdyke with the not jealous exactly but 
perhaps slightly resentful air of a Queen Mother 
remembering at the last minute all the important 
things that she had forgotten to say during that much 
too long visitation and demanding everyone in sight 
to collect her unnecessary belongings that she imme¬ 
diately put down in a place from which she moved 
away so that they had to be re-collected and when, at 
last, in the car and all ready with the gracious bow 
and smile for the metaphorical newspaper snapshot 
man, uttering the well-known cry of distress because a 
gold bag, or a bead bag or some fool thing had been 
left behind, which meant a general scuffling round to 
be followed by the certain “ Oh, dear me, how stupid. 
I have it, after all.” 

Mrs. McKenzie, with the thing she called a hat at a 
rakish angle, making farewell jokes and laughing 
loudly, calling out last words above the general din to 
Beatrix and Pelham who didn’t want to hear them; 
advising books to read and Exhibitions to see and 
music to hear and plays to avoid, and just as she 
was about to be heaved into the car turning with a 
“ By the way, I can’t go before I tell you the latest 
about the President ”, or Mr. Harvey, or whoever it 
was, and treading on the agitated feet of the wretched 
Vanderdyke; uttering a pea-hen scream and in the 
middle of an apology remembering, yes and telling, 
still another thing they ought to hear. 

For the rest, Aunt Honoria to the last minute silent, 
with one hand on Beatrix’s shoulder and the other on 
Pelham’s arm, and then “ My dearest girl ”, “ My 
darling Auntie ”, “ Au revoir, my boy ”, “ So beastly 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


155 


sorry you’re leaving us ”, and that was all. A rare 
woman. The Major letting off cliches, pretending to 
kiss Pelham and going through all the tricks of the 
elderly gentleman whose mother had made the fatal 
mistake of saying that he had more genuine humor 
than the great comedians of the stage. And finally 
May Beamish with a smiling “ Goodbye, Mrs. Frank¬ 
lin ”, and a masterly, “ So long, Pel ”, and a yard of 
excellent leg. 

The quiet oozing of the door, the thick purring as 
of a great tom-cat, the grind of gravel, the heavy regal 
movement and — peace. 

“ So endeth the Great Day,” said Beatrix, holding 
out the handkerchief that she’d been waving for any¬ 
one to take. Is there no milliner brain ingenious 
enough to invent a place for a pocket in a woman’s 
clothes ? 

Pelham had to take it because Malcolm had dis¬ 
creetly disappeared. “ Endeth,” he echoed. “ Don’t 
you believe it,” and he seized her hand. 

“ I don’t,” she said. “ I only said so on behalf of 
that carload, whose interest in it is over. It’s just 
going to begin for me.” 

“ Is it? You mean— ” And he bent to kiss her, 
blazing with hope and love. And got the lobe of an 
ear and a laugh. But he held her and led her through 
the hall and out into the sun on the verandah. 

If he went on like that, the imp and Alec Greenwood 
could go to blazes together. 

“ Now then, let’s have this out,” he said, going 
strong. 

“ What out?” with great encouragement. 

“ The thing you said before lunch.” 

“ Good Heavens, that was a week ago.” 


156 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ A month, a year. I’m sorry, but I’m glad that 
ghastly family business is over. It’s no good pretend¬ 
ing you’ve forgotten. Or if you have, and you were 
just pulling my leg to hear it snap, you ought to be 
shot for it.” 

“ Why? If you hold me so tight I shall probably 
die without shooting.” 

And the fool let her go. Why doesn’t someone 
teach men about women? She was pleading to be 
hurt. 

“ Because you’ve put me through the rottenest day 
I’ve ever had. That’s why. You sent me away and 
I went. There’s no getting over it. If you didn’t 
want me to go you'd only to say so. You don’t think 
that I wanted to go, do you? ” 

“ That’s the point,” she said. 

“ What’s the point? ” 

“ Precisely that. You’ve got it.” 

“ I'm damned if I know what you mean.” 

That was bad. That was weak. He should have 
said “I don’t give a damn what you mean” and 
shouted, got red in the face, kicked one of those nice 
cane chairs over, caught her roughly in his arms and 
kissed her breath away. As it was, the imp and Alec 
Greenwood would have to be retained, unless he got 
back into anger and indignation again and kept there. 

“If you ever did know what I mean,” she said, 
giving him another chance, “ we shouldn’t be having 
this frightful row on such a day as this.” 

“ Frightful row?” he said, amazed. 

“Well, what do you call it, then? You grab hold 
of me, you ruin a perfectly new frock, you march me 
out here like a culprit, you bruise both my shoulders 
and yell at the top of your voice.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


157 


“ I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. 

And although she was close enough to be kissed and 
both her hands were clasped behind her back, he let 
the chance go by, and stood bewildered, like an over¬ 
grown boy. He had never yelled at the top of his 
voice, except at a drunken coolie. And as to bruising 
her shoulders . . . 

Oh, how maddening it was. Why couldn’t he 
understand the language? Why couldn’t he pick up 
his cues? She was saying one thing and meaning 
another. It was all so simple. It was girl, that’s all. 

And just as she was going to cry a little and see 
what that would do, — the lowest of the feminine 
tricks to which she would have condescended to please 
Malcolm and be very generous, — Pelham Vander- 
dyke Franklin was wheeled between them by the 
woman who had as much soul as the figurehead of a 
ship, and as much sympathy as a lobster. And, at the 
sight of that sleeping wonder, Beatrix changed from 
a girl into a reasonable being. And as she bent over 
one side of the perambulator and Pelham took the 
other, the hard-bosomed woman moved away. This 
was after all her twenty-second infant! 

“Ssssh!” went Beatrix, holding up an anxiously 
warning finger, but speaking all the same. “ Isn’t he, 
oh, isn’t he a darling, Pel? ” 

The parental grin shifted all the bewilderment from 
Pelham’s face. “ I should think he jolly well is,” he 
said. 

“ Look at those little lashes, I ask you! ” 

“ Lashes ? I didn’t think a baby started lashes until 
he was at least a year old.” 

“ Other babies.” 

“ Of course, I see what you mean.” He squared his 


158 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


shoulders and slanted his head. No one could do him 
out of a certain amount of the credit. 

And with untranslatable tenderness and the urge of 
maternal passion she bent still lower and touched the 
little cheek with her lips. 

“ Look out. You’ll wake him.” 

“ No, I shan’t. I know him too well.” And when 
she looked up her eyes were swimming, and all the 
story was in them of the months that he had lived with 
her, — all hers then, unshared. 

And with an admiration and a gratitude that it was 
hopeless to attempt to say, Pelham picked up her hand 
and kissed it. She was his love, his wife, he adored 
her. She was even more wonderful than this sleeping 
child to whom, during all those months, she had given 
herself in devotion. 

But when the baby stirred, and, in soothing him with 
her hand he caught her finger, a stab of jealousy, red 
hot, brought Pelham into speech. “ Don’t ever let him 
come between us, Bee. You were mine before you 
were his.” 

And then the figurehead bore down to do her duty. 
“ Time he went in,” she said, and wheeled the 
perambulator away. 

There they were again, facing each other. And all 
that this man had to do to end the argument, to send 
the flag of peace flying mast high on the roof top, to 
drive that imp away with his tail between his legs and 
render Alec Greenwood as lifeless as a last month’s 
magazine, was to forget the husband and be the lover. 

But if he knew nothing about women he knew a 
million times less about girls. “ Don’t let that boy 
come between us,” he repeated, as if the first time 
wasn’t foolish enough. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


159 


Good Lord, she couldn’t let that go by. It was far 
too silly; the tu quoque far too obvious. “Not this 
boy," she said. “But now that I’m down again and 
bursting with life, there are plenty of others.” 

A car roared up the drive, back-firing, and with its 
throttle out. If it had been mechanically possible to 
have added to the din its driver would have done so. 
“ There’s Alec Greenwood, for instance. Greenwood 
so suggestive of spring.” 

“ Greenwood? ... By God, if you . . 

“Well?” And once more she stood close enough 
to be taken and kissed and have her shoulders bruised, 
and be shouted at, with her hands behind her back. 

But out came Greenwood, glossy and eager and 
ready for all the fun he could get. 

And it was too late. . . . These husbands, — why 
don’t they understand? 


VI 


And then, what? 

Well, the three inevitable reactions. Greenwood’s 
dramatic pause as he strode hungrily towards Beatrix, 
by which, well within ten seconds, he intended to con¬ 
vey a sort of struck dumbness at the sight of her 
again; and then the shooting-out of both hands. He 
was a both-hand man. And then the “ I . . . I . . .” 
and the deferential bend of the parting-less head, 
because what was the use of words. All carried out 
with something, but only something, of the insincere 
sincerity of the actor, who, whether hopeless, or just 
bad, on the stage, always overacts in private life, and 


160 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


is possessed of the belief that he has only to touch a 
woman’s hand and register complete abasement to turn 
her heart over and be bothered with a victim. It can’t 
be done by any other kind of — is man the word? 
And then the slow return to consciousness and the eye- 
tour of admiration and the longing to possess from 
hair to eyes, and from eyes to mouth, and all about 
the neck and shoulders. . . . 

By which time Beatrix thought it wise to speak. 
And so the “ Oh, hullo, Alec ”, and the rather stiff 
drawing away and firm recovery of hands, and the 
instant making of a contrast, to the overwhelming dis¬ 
advantage of the too close man, whose eye was trained 
to look through serge and flannel, silk or whatever 
else was worn. 

And the blazingly jealous husband, outraged, 
glowering, without pretence of politeness, with his 
gruff “ How are you ”, which hoped to Heaven you 
weren’t. 

It was all over in less than a minute, — one of the 
well-known marriage minutes. And before Green¬ 
wood, who never would have confessed to himself that 
he was amazed to have been invited, but was all the 
same, could do more than open up with the “ How 
Splendid you look. How Kind of you to have me. 
How Wonderful it is to . . .” Pelham had muttered 
the usual thing about having to go and look after it 
didn’t matter what in order to prevent himself from 
assault and battery, and be alone to curse. 

But when he slammed the door of his den and 
startled the staring heads on the walls almost into 
batting their glass eyes, Malcolm got up and put both 
feet into it. 

“ Ah,” he said. “ Greenwood.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


161 


At which, there being so uncanny an appropriate¬ 
ness in this remark, Pelham drew up short. “ Green¬ 
wood? What the devil made you drag in Green¬ 
wood? If you mean that Greenwood’s here, he is 
. . . And if you asked him what the hell did you do 
it for without speaking to me? ” 

“ My dear chap . . 

“ Eve nothing against Greenwood. Nothing at all 
in his own dog-kennel. Let him live as he likes. It’s 
his life. But I’ll be damned if I want him anywhere 
within a million miles of Beatrix, so you may as well 
know that now.” 

He was as certain as death that Mally would no 
more have invited that rotten Greenwood to his house 
than forge a cheque, but as he loved Beatrix far too 
well to swear at her, or not well enough, — it’s open 
to argument — someone had to be sworn at, and Mal¬ 
colm was obviously the one. Wasn’t he his best 
friend? And whatever the pacifistic person may say 
about swearing there are moments in the life of every 
man, especially if he is married, when it’s the essential 
safety valve. Every suppressed damn goes to the 
making of an ulcer. 

And it was because Malcolm was his best friend and 
also a man of keen imagination that he put both feet 
into it, deliberately. It is possible to find unselfishness 
in this world. Besides, Malcolm had already ex¬ 
hausted all his own swear words on the subject of 
Greenwood and it would help him considerably to 
hear Pelham’s stock of oaths. So, one way and 
another, it all fitted in. 

And so after Greenwood had been flung from man 
to man and very properly mangled, Pelham showed 
that he had returned to normal, without having com- 


162 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


mitted an irretrievable act, by lighting a pipe. For 
several minutes there was silence, while Pelham, utterly 
at a loss to understand the meaning of this natural but 
distressing tangent, stalked up and down, and Mal¬ 
colm, equally at a loss and desperately anxious, 
watched him from a comfortable chair. One can be 
more concentratedly anxious in a comfortable chair 
than any other. 

Finally Pelham came out with Malcolm’s original 
question. “ What the mischief is she up to? ” 

And Malcolm gave him Beatrix’s own answer. 
“ Just that.” 

“ Well, old man, it all beats me.” 

“ Me too.” 

“ I don’t know a damned thing about women and I 
know less than ever about Beatrix.” 

“ So do I.” 

“ And this is supposed to be the great day. Who’s 
great day? So far it’s been the family’s. Now it’s 
going to be Greenwood’s. Where do I come in? I 
told you there was something in her smile, and that 
I’d been trying to think. Just before lunch she told 
me what’s been in the back of her head. Has she said 
anything to you?” 

“ Yes, — but nothing I could put my teeth into.” 

“ And the more she tells me about it the less I see 
what she means. I went away. I was told to go away. 
But I went. I ought not to have done what I was 
told. . . . Can you make head or tail out of that? 
And so she’s holding me off. She’s making me feel 
like a lodger in my own house. She’s got a grudge 
against me for doing what she didn’t want me to do 
and I loathed doing and only did because she wanted 
me to do it. If that isn’t enough to make an ordinary 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 163 

man walk head downwards with his feet on the ceiling, 
what is, — that’s what I want someone to tell me.” 

“ Well, I can’t,” said Malcolm. 

“ No,” said Pelham, with a sort of laugh. “ You 
don’t know a single damn thing about women.” 

And neither of them was required to do so, then, 
at that stage of the difficult game. What they needed 
to know was something, however little, about a girl, 
which was very different. 

So on they blundered, going round and round like 
squirrels in a cage, both of them in love and one of 
them, who had the right, passionately and supremely 
desiring, slap up against the cross-road, without 
knowing it. Inspiration was missing. Imagination 
led them into jungles instead of out into the open. 
Both could only think of dealing with this crisis with 
tenderness and sensitiveness and respect and what 
were needed, if either had been struck suddenly with a 
mere glimmer of insight into the queer nature of girl, 
and this girl, just on her feet once more and terrify¬ 
ingly young, were a huge stone axe and shoutings. 
Romance as the reaction to practicality. 

Finally, Malcolm gave his friend the wrong advice, 
— advice is always wrong. “ Go out,” he said, “ and 
abase yourself. Say that you are frightfully sorry 
that you went away. Ask her to forgive you, and I 
don’t see what on earth she can do but forget her 
grudge and carry on from there.” 

But Pelham saw, poor devil, and pretty soon. 

He went out, armed with humbleness, stirred deeply 
by a great love, passionately desiring, and found Bea¬ 
trix standing on the doorstep in the evening sun. 
Alec Greenwood was out of hearing, tinkering with 
his back-firing, open-throttled, speed-breaking, obvi- 


164 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


ously Greenwood car, better looking than ever, better 
dressed than ever, and as unscrupulous as never before. 

And when Beatrix felt a touch on her elbow she 
turned with a pathetic eagerness to the simple, honest, 
most devoted man whom she had never been so glad 
to own, so proud to belong to, or so eager to love. 
Does he, — oh, does he understand? It’s all so simple. 
Just girl stuff, —nothing else. 

And this is what she got. “ Bee,’’ he said. “ Bee 
darling, I’m most frightfully sorry. When you tell 
me to do a thing again, IT1 never do it. . . Fool, 
what a fool! 

An angry look, a burst of laughter and a whirl 
away. “ All right, Alec. I've changed my mind. 
Come on, let’s drive out like the devil. And if vour 

7 J 

noisy collection of old iron leaves the earth, we’ll fly.” 

And in she sprang, and in went Greenwood, seeing 
fun. And there stood Pelham Franklin, who didn’t 
understand, listening to the open throttle till the 
hideous sound of it was gone. 

A great day! — and a chance missed, and a cross¬ 
road. 


PART V 


I 

The Chinese have many sound sayings. One of 
them is that “ if you hurt your foot before four o’clock 
make up your mind to bark your shins before going 
to bed.” 

And this came into the rather angry mind of May 
Beamish late that afternoon when, having returned to 
a red-hot New York with Elizabeth McKenzie, who 
had to attend a meeting of some sort after dinner, she 
found an unstamped letter waiting for her on the hall 
table. Having hurt her foot severely when the Frank¬ 
lin door was slammed upon it by Beatrix, she was not 
in the least surprised to bark her shins, so to speak, 
against a note in the all-too familiar handwriting of 
Valentine Beamish. 

She had driven into the City in an open Packard. 
Mrs. McKenzie was one of those enthusiastic motor¬ 
ists who never feel that they have really been wholly 
out unless their eyes are filled with dust and their lungs 
with other people’s carbon. The day had been hot and 
cloudless and the road through the suburbs had been 
packed tight with every known machine, a long, slow 
procession of air seekers, most of them in shirt sleeves. 
Like all English women who are perfectly certain that 
some sinister trick has been played by the Gulf Stream 
if the thermometer touches sixty-eight, May had wilted 
in the good American June sunshine which had sent 


166 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


the glass up to eighty-two, and she drew a laugh from 
her dishevelled but imperturbable hostess on arrival by 
saying, “ Oh, my Lord, I feel exactly like a spoonful of 
Brand’s essence.” And she almost slithered down the 
three fashionable steps of the re-fronted narrow house 
which had not yet been captured by “ Immaculata ” 
the milliner, or “ Shilluski,” the maker of habits. 

Too late for tea, it was precisely the moment for a 
cocktail, and begging that it might be sent up to her 
bathroom May went immediately to that harbor of 
resuscitation to bathe her barked shin. In water as 
cold as she could get it and a bottle of Morny’s bath 
salts to give it a sting, our wee friend opened her 
loving husband’s letter. 

“ Dear old thing,” it ran, in a hand unused to a pen, 
“ the picture postcard that you sent me of the sky¬ 
scrapers behind the Aquitania caught me at a 
moment when everything here seemed to be low-lying 
and despondent. So I’ve jumped over to gaze up at 
those heights and renew my acquaintance with you. 
I'm stopping at a pub, well called The Biltmore 
because it is undoubtedly more built than the other 
gigantic places round it, and I shall be honored and 
delighted if you will dine with me tonight. The man 
who thought that he might as well take this chit mus¬ 
tered up just enough energy to tell me that you will be 
back from the country in time to ring me up. Please 
do, and if it doesn’t suit you to peck with me tonight 
lunch with me tomorrow. V. B.” 

In a thoughtless moment, then, she had put her 
address on that inspiring postcard, and this was the 
result. Valentine Beamish was the last man on earth 
who should leave his own country or bother her in her 
new surroundings. Essentially English he would be 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


167 


a lost spirit away from his Club, his book-maker and 
his golf course, while she was in the precarious posi¬ 
tion of a fishing smack, which, having caught an allur¬ 
ing glimpse of harbor, was struggling in the blanket 
of a thick sea-fog. Beatrix would have been delighted 
at the simile. 

At the same time it was not her way to dodge the 
inevitable. Almost before a tooth had to be filled she 
seated herself in the dentist’s chair. She would meet 
Valentine at once and move Heaven and earth to 
induce him to return to his well-loved Piccadilly on 
the first ship that was to sail. There were two insur¬ 
mountable reasons for this quick decision. One was 
that the presence of a husband at that difficult moment 
in her crusade was quite fatal. Whatever dramatic 
interest she had been able to surround herself with in 
Pelham’s eyes, — and it wasn’t much — lay in the fact 
that she was so alone, as well as so tiny and so cour¬ 
ageous. And the other that she was pretty certain that 
the keeping of the gallant and impecunious Valentine 
at the Biltmore would make a deep hole in her little 
store of dollars. As a soldier, required no longer by a 
grateful Government, he would have nothing but 
medals to rattle in his pocket. 

And so, after the usual struggle with a telephone 
operator to be connected with the desired number, 
and the usual brusque disinclination on the part of a 
girl at the hotel, who really didn’t give a damn what 
sort of reputation she tarred it with, to believe that 
any Major Beamish was staying there, May, little 
short of a gibbering lunatic, got on. But she was 
answered by a man with a strong cockney accent who 
said that the Major was ’avin a bath, but that the mes¬ 
sage should be conveyed. . . . Which meant, as plain 


168 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


as a pikestaff, that there were two men in the country 
for her to keep. “ How exactly like Val. Beamish to 
have brought a valet to put the cuff links in his only 
shirt,” she said, addressing the group of curly-haired 
cherubs that hung over her bed. But she laughed all 
the same. It had its funny side. 

Dressing poor and wearing only her wedding ring, 
the uncomfortably hot and extremely worried May 
went in to see her hostess and explain the contretemps. 
She found Mrs. McKenzie in her muddled boudoir, 
lying on a sofa covered with pamphlets, wrapped in 
a much stained dressing gown, with the telephone on 
her chest. Between loud howls of laughter at her own 
extravagant phrases she was obviously summing up 
the question of France’s attitude towards Germany to 
a member of a Woman’s Political Club. With grow¬ 
ing impatience, but a sweet persistent smile, May was 
forced to listen to her views, which amazingly enough, 
were sound. “ My dear, whatever you may say, the 
Germans forced the war to bleed us white, every 
mother’s son of us. She’s utterly unrepentant and is 
filled with gas and aeroplanes. She’s teaching all her 
young to hate the French with a deep consuming fury, 
and unless England and Belgium stop France’s fear 
of another attack by entering into a binding treaty 
Europe goes into the pit as sure as death. Excuse me 
a moment, darling. Yes, my dear? ” 

Whereupon May told her little story. “ You’re 
busy to-night,” she said, “ so you won’t mind if I go 
out to dinner, will you? It’s a great nuisance and of 
course I would so much rather be with you, but the 
truth is that I promised to spend an evening with a 
nice woman who was on board the Aquitania with 
me. And this is the only one she’s got before she goes 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


169 


away. I won’t be late. Break up the meeting, won’t 
you, and come into my room and tell me all about it.” 

One of the yellowest of all yellow taxis, but one that 
had been blue the day before, drove her bumpily to the 
Biltmore. During the adventurous journey which sent 
her heart into her mouth several times at the narrow 
shaves from permanent disuse she congratulated her¬ 
self upon having been wise enough to lie herself out of 
an inconvenient husband. She knew that if she had 
confessed to the sudden arrival of Valentine Mrs. 
McKenzie would never have rested until she had 
possessed herself of him, — a new toy, a new lion, 
virgin earth for her to till. Besides, she did not want 
the remotest connubiality in that nice room of hers. 

At the top of the stairs which had been peeled of 
their carpet stood, conspicuously, a tall, slight, graceful 
man in a much-waisted dinner jacket. An interested 
and rather whimsical smile was in his deep-set eyes, 
his black short hair which was so well groomed as 
almost to have lost its most annoying kink, his small 
moustache beneath a Wellingtonian nose made a thin 
dark line on a short upper lip, and a lean strong jaw 
seemed still to smart from a recent application of a 
Regent Street astringent. He didn’t see the little soul 
from the Rectory, to whom he had given all he had to 
give before going out to make a six foot mound upon 
the breast of France, until her hand was on his arm. 
And then he looked down and his smile changed to one 
that was even more whimsical than it had been before. 

“ Oh, hullo, Kitten,” he said evenly. “ Who’d have 
thought of our croppin’ up here?” 


170 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


II 

They went into the place designed for summer hus¬ 
bands, — those lonely business martyrs who are only 
able to join their wives and children in the country 
over the week-end and do their best to keep away 
depression during intervening evenings by dining with 
summer friends. There were ferns and fountains, dis¬ 
creet corners, and insufficient space for dancing so that 
dancing was impossible but it was necessary to hold a 
partner close, and a lavish and perspiring band. The 
open roof gave a view of the same star-spangled sky 
that hung over all the Hamptons, and the rugged rocks 
of Maine, and if the air did not contain the cool sea 
tang of those nice places it came, what there was of it, 
from very willing electric fans. Cheerfulness, however 
forced, prevailed at all the tables, which managed to 
be wet in spite of the costliest of all the laws, and it 
was obvious that there were many pretty women in 
New York to take pity on the working man. 

From a one-night knowledge of the place Valentine 
had seen the force of reserving a table on the edge of 
the open square, and to this he led the way. The band 
was in one of its lugubrious spasms at the moment, so 
that all the husbands present were trying to forget 
their bachelorhood in the arms of kind though week¬ 
day partners, and no one, new to New York, would 
have sensed the underlying sadness of the scene, 
although the sob of the Hawaiian music must have 
moved a gargoyle. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


171 


A dozen lines of laughter appeared at the corners of 
Beamish’s eyes as he flipped out his undried napkin 
and faced his wife. “ I’ve ordered dinner/’ he said, 
“ but I don’t in the least know what you like, so I’m 
rather in a funk about it. Quaint and rather amusing 
to think that although we’ve been married eight years 
I know as little about your likes and dislikes as any 
other stranger.” 

“Yes,” said May, “isn't it? When you weren’t 
fighting you were in hospital and so . . .” She 
shrugged one small round shoulder. What was quaint 
and amusing to her was rather the way he described 
that fact than the fact itself. “ Any other stranger ” 
summed it up so well. Theirs had certainly been a 
khaki marriage par excellence. Examining him closely 
she found at once that although he was less good- 
looking than when she had seen him last, a consider¬ 
able time ago, he was infinitely more attractive, — she 
almost used the word distinguished. He had lost the 
determination to be blase that is cultivated by every 
undergraduate, — the over-polite insolence, the effort 
to appear effete, the loud mechanical workings to pre¬ 
vent the bubbling up of irresistible interest, the strain¬ 
ing after an epigrammatical turn of phrase. He was 
no longer self-conscious. He had, in fact, emerged 
from Oxford swaddling clothes, and had shed his col¬ 
lege colors for those of his country. Even St. Paul, 
who deals with so many travelers, would be able to 
pronounce him English without glancing at his pass¬ 
port. He might have been thirty-five rather than the 
thirty that he was. She liked the man that he had 
grown into very much indeed. The word stranger was 
the right one. 

As for Beamish he said what came into his mind 


172 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


about this small, imperturbable person out loud, very 
simply. “ You’re marvellously the same, Kitten. You 
don’t look a day older than when I saw you that first 
night at Rutland Gate. Nice house, that, and how 
good your dear old aunt used to be to all the cubs she 
encouraged. How’ve you done it? By takin’ things 
as philosophically as usual?” He still retained the 
paradoxically illiterate trick of discarding his final gs. 

The soup came, jellied. 

“ I dunno,” she answered, purring a little. “ I sleep 
well, I suppose. Then too, never being able to forget 
my early training, I don’t expect much and never fret 
when I don’t get it. A better scheme than massage 
to keep the lines away. When did you come over? ” 

“ I landed yesterday. By jove, this band can play! 
I came over steerage on the Majestic ” 

“ What! ” She nearly performed the nose trick 
with her soup. “Steerage? . . . You!” 

“Why not? Needs must when the War Office 
drives. You see, when Lloyd George made a hand¬ 
some present of Ireland to the Sinn Fein people we 
were marched home and turned loose on the streets. 
Since you came into that little legacy from your good 
aunt, who deserves and I’m certain has been given a 
comfortable corner in a better world, and were gen¬ 
erous enough to scratch my paltry allowance to you, I 
managed to save a bit. I shoved it all on the Derby 
winner in a moment of light-headed desperation, and 
am better off at this moment than I’ve been since the 
second year of the war. I won a thousand pounds, 
and after I had paid my cigarette bill and few other 
things including a long-sufferin’ tailor for uniforms, 
I stood up worth six hundred of the best. The only 
job I was offered in London was rather beyond my 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


173 


mental capacity, — it was to play the cymbals in an 
ex-officers’ band on the island in the middle of Cock- 
spur Street — the only instrument I’ve mastered is the 
Jew’s harp, — and then your postcard came, re-ad¬ 
dressed from Dublin, and here I am to try my luck.” 

Oh, that was good news, if you like! Then he had 
not turned up to poach on her preserves and live in 
luxury on a reluctant wife. She warmed beneath the 
blow. The Valentine that she had known had certainly 
grown up. 

“ You take my breath away,” she said, with that 
occasional naivete of hers. “ Do you mind if I say 
that I thought you’d come over to live on me ? ” 

“ Yes,” he said. “ As a matter of fact I do, rather. 
There are only a few of us like that, y’know.” 

“ I’m awfully sorry, Val. I offer you my most 
humble apologies.” And she held out a really repent¬ 
ant hand. She was in for an evening of mis judg¬ 
ments. 

He held it, warmly, and bowed. “ Thanks,” he said. 

And so they knew where they were. They were 
both workers. They were both members of the great 
army of would-be-wage-earners filled with the laudable 
ambition to grub up whatever was going in a much 
picked over field. Excellent and difficult. 

Cold chicken and salad, pommes Maitre d’Hotel. 

The band, greatly daring and possibly a little dese¬ 
crating even in these most careless times, was making 
a fox trot of “ Nearer, my God, to Thee.” Every¬ 
body danced, and nobody knew what it was. 

“ Who’s the man who answered the telephone?” 

Beamish chuckled. “ A very old friend of mine,” 
he answered. “ He gives his name as ‘ Arry ’Arris 
and has been my bat-man for five years. A most 


174 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


coaxin’ hand with a pair of tops and gets more into 
a suit-case than seems quite fair.” 

“ Did you come across him here? ” 

“ No. I brought him over. He thought he’d like 
to see what America has to offer, too.” 

To the practical May, whose school had been a hard 
one, the process of allowing oneself to be followed by 
stray dogs, humane as it was, seemed more than 
merely Quixotic at the best of times. But under these 
conditions . . . 

Beamish read her gesture perfectly. “ I know,” he 
said. “ The broke leading the broke, but it isn’t 
quite so comic as it looks. Harris has been as good as 
a mother to me ever since he joined my Squadron as 
a mechanic. I have the greatest respect and affection 
for him, and he'd willingly go to Hell for me. In 
fact he has, often. When we were disbanded he had 
nowhere to go to because his three brothers had gone 
west early in the war, and his wife had died givin’ 
birth to another feller’s baby. And so, as he wasn’t 
above goin’ steerage as some of his sort would have 
been, I invited him to join me and he made a delightful 
companion. He plays Bezique like a pro, has a keen 
sense of fun, becomes more and more cheerful when 
everything is rottenest and possesses the rarest of all 
the gifts — gratitude. I wish I could remember some 
of his epoch-makin’ remarks as we sat in the Zoo of 
the Majestic being examined by the first class passen¬ 
gers — many of whom it was easy to recognize as the 
people we fought for and whose pockets we filled. Oh, 
and by the way, before I forget it, will you make a 
note of our address after tomorrow? The Y.M.C.A., 
West 57 th Street. Harris doesn’t think the Biltmore 
can hold a candle to that admirable club.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


175 


She liked this new man and his utter simplicity, his 
cool and ungrumbling acceptance of things as they had 
hit him, and his rather unique way of snowing brown 
as he couldn’t snow white. The war, which had 
knocked the world edgeways, and the peace which had 
found out the weak spots in the universal character, 
had turned the undergraduate Valentine that she had 
known at Rutland Gate into a man who had won his 
Master of Arts in the University of life. But for her 
intense and natural longing for luxury as the reaction 
of the respectable pauperism of her early life she 
would be glad to claim him as her husband, and set up 
a partnership in the street of adventure. That is if 
he had the remotest desire to be claimed after her cold¬ 
blooded breakage of their marriage vows and her 
frank, and not to say brutal notice, written as far back 
as 1916, as to the evaporation of their khaki ecstasy. 
And this she doubted. There was nothing in his man¬ 
ner that suggested the remotest spark of affection, or 
* anything like a desire to be nearer to her than the other 
side of a dinner table. He was courteous and friendly; 
interested as a man would be who met a woman again 
who was the little sister of a buried friend. And 
being a woman her vanity was piqued at this attitude, 
although it was essential to her scheme, — one that 
had been laid very flat that afternoon by Beatrix. 
However, great is the blessing of optimism. She 
might even now catch Franklin on the hop. Undoubt¬ 
edly there had been a rift within the lute . . . 

And so this peculiar evening wound itself slowly 
out. Their unstrained conversation, continually inter¬ 
rupted by the energetic band, and the almost incessant 
and wholly insane wobbling of the closely jammed joy- 
seekers, went from personalities into topics of general 


176 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


discussion, — Lloyd George and his divine right to 
blunder, the gamin impudence of his egregious jackal, 
Swollenhead, the amazing patience of their courageous 
countrymen, the certain knowledge of France that she 
would be attacked again unless England and Belgium 
guaranteed her future, the pathetic faith of America 
in the Atlantic as a means of protection from the decay 
and disease of Europe. Finally the pause which 
lengthened into silence, the wandering eyes, the 
smothered yawn. 

“ Will you see me home ? ” 

“ Of course.” 

“ Let’s walk.” 

And then the street, the clanging trolley car, the 
soliciting taxicab, a resuscitating breeze that parted 
the curtains of the overheated city, a ceiling of stars 
above the high gulley, a slouching figure on the hunt 
for fruitful garbage cans, spots of color in the lighted 
windows of interior decorators, passing cars, the smart 
McKenzie house. 

“ Well,’’ said Beamish, “ a jolly evenin’. How 
awfully nice of you to come.” 

“ How awfully nice of you to have me,” said May. 
“ Let’s do it again next week.” 

“ Nothin’ I should enjoy more.” He held out a 
hand, and the light of the lamp above the wrought iron 
door showed the lines of the new whimsical smile at 
the corners of his eyes. 

“ So long, Val.” 

“ So long, Kitten.” 

“ Good luck, old boy.” 

“Thanks, I need it. All good luck to you.” 

And when the door was opened by the disobliging 
man, Major Valentine Beamish waved his hand. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


177 


And Mrs. Valentine Beamish waved back. 
Curious thing, war. 


Ill 

“ Not a spark in the old fire,” said Beamish to him¬ 
self, strolling back. “ Never was much of a fire even 
when I put the match of youthful sentiment to it. It 
never really blazed. Her daintiness and delicate color, 
courage, and the fact that she had suffered, worked on 
my imagination. It seemed then, when life was as 
good as over, to be the chivalrous thing to give her my 
name and whatever it might be worth. There was no 
other girl at the time. We all wanted to insure the 
fact, I suppose, that there was someone to own us, a 
precious particular person who would receive our 
identification discs as soon after the War Office tele¬ 
gram as possible, and carry on. If she were broke to 
the wide and the ordinary flaccid, make the worst of it, 
parasitical girl, we should have to go through the farci¬ 
cal tragedy of a war marriage, despising the whole 
business and losing the fine edge of self-respect. As 
it is there is a perfectly reasonable mutual agreement 
to recognize the mistake and go our own ways. She 
has her own money, such as it is, as well as ambition 
and individualism. When she wants to marry again 
she’ll let me know and I shall provide the law with 
the regulation dirtiness. When I do, as I hope I shall, 
if the Bluebird flies my way, I shall put it to her and 
the same routine will follow. It might easily be a jolly 
sight worse. As to the Bluebird, that darling Ameri- 


178 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


can girl who nursed at Amiens, who cured me of one 
wound and gave me another, — my God, I’ll find her 
if I have to walk over every inch of this country.” 
He gave out this statement to an echoing street and 
laughed at its highfalutin’. Not much of a laugh, 
because however melodramatic and heroic the senti¬ 
ment sounded in these tuppence colored words, it was 
the underlying reason of his discovery of America, the 
urge that had sent him to the nearest ship the very 
moment that he was free. There was a blaze in this 
fire, and it had refused to burn itself out in spite of 
the five intervening years. “ I’m on my uppers,” he 
added, “ and I can’t ask her to marry me even if I 
find her, — not at once, not until I’ve got a job. And 
if I do find her and there isn’t any longer that look in 
her eyes, or if she’s married, — well, I’m used to 
carrying on, and there’s sure to be another war. My 
name’s on the books, and the good old W.O. will bung 
me a nice letter, and I shall forgive and go home. 
They know that. * It’s back to the Army agin, Ser¬ 
geant, back to the Army agin.’ ” And he laughed and 
stuck out his chest rather comically. 

All the bands in the Biltmore had ceased for the day. 
Those strenuous instrumentalists who thumped out 
music with hardly a pause for breath must be lying 
flat on their backs on well-earned beds. A few un¬ 
attached people wandered in to get their keys and a 
bevy of elderly women were washing the marble floors. 
They are always elderly women who come out to do 
this thing at night, poor souls. And when, having 
been jerked to the topmost floor, Beamish walked a 
mile or two in search of his attic room without a bath, 
he found it filled with the reek of shag and the dolor¬ 
ous singing of a nasal voice. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


179 


“ Me brovar’s cut ’is blimey froat, 

Me sister’s got the ’flu, 

Me farver’s pawned ’is only goat, 

And muvver’s time is due, 

But . . . giv< me the good old ’ome once more, 
Give me the good old spot. . . 

“ Well, give it to me,” said Beamish. “ Two fingers 
and a blob of ice.” 

“ Very good, sir.” And up sprang ’Arry ’Arris 
from the edge of his bed, dropped the shoe that he 
was cleaning, flicked a salute, and brought out the 
smuggled bottle of Haig and Haig from its hiding 
place. Quick as you like. 

For all his reach-me-down civilian garments, — rid¬ 
ing up at the collar, too long in the sleeves, too short 
at the back with a gaping slit, too tight in the leg, the 
usual thing that comes off a peg and, if the most subtle 
care is not exercised, out of the expensive tailor’s shop 
— ’Arris came through as soldier. The tilt of his 
bull-dog jaw, the size of his feet, the work of his 
elbow, the donkey driver’s twist left by a sheep shearer 
rather than a barber on his bullet head, the ingratiating 
angelic expression of the old hand ready at any minute 
to reply, “ Not my fault, sir. Wasn’t there at the time, 
sir, no, sir,” the whippy action of the knees and the 
soapy points of the beer-accustomed moustache, all 
stamped the little man like the Army Service Corps 
brand on a mule. Not only that but the flourish with 
which he handed the glass to Beamish with a “ whisky 
’nsodersir,” proclaimed him bat-man in the British 
Army. 

“ Thanks,” said Beamish, tossing his hat into a 
chair and immediately retrieving it to hang it tenderly 
on a hook. “ Have one yourself, ’Arry.” It was not 


180 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


friendly to put back the superfluous aitch without 
which he had rubbed along all his life. 

“ No, thank yer, sir, no, sir.” But the tip of the 
tongue all round the lips bespoke an enormous desire. 

And so Beamish took the bottle to another glass and 
made it so. “ Better times,” he said, clicking. 

“ Same ter you, sir, I’m sure, sir.” And by Josh 
that was worth being kept out of bed for. Went down 
something wonderful. Good old aigenaig. And then, 
out of the corners of the shrewdest eyes, he began to 
study the man whose every mood he knew, anxiously 
wondering how things had gone with that there little 
bit of selfish stuff wot ought ter be shook. He saw, 
and was surprised to see, a very happy look in the 
eyes of the Crusoe to whom he was Man Friday in 
this new country, a look which seemed to convey a 
huge relief with a new spark of light burning behind it. 

“ Urn,” he thought, with the sense of drama and 
fondness for horrors that goes with all the ’Arrises, 
“ praps ’es choked the cat,” though, of course, the 
word he used belongs to the wife of a rival family of 
domestic pets. But he knew better than to ask. This 
man was not only his benefactor but his friend. He 
liked now to be treated on terms of strict equality. 
All the old stuff, proper to the Service, was a wash¬ 
out, — not that ’Arry could ever remember it for 
more than a minute every other day. But there was, 
he knew instinctively, one door that he must never 
venture to open, in or out of his cups. Mrs. Beamish. 
On that was written the word that he had seen most 
frequently wherever the good old Boche had been, and 
on which he seemed to thrive, — “ Verboten.” He 
had, of course, taken the telephone message and so he 
knew about the meeting. He had also played Peeping 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


181 


Tom through the waiters’ door in the Restaurant for 
Summer Husbands and enjoyed his first look at the 
wife who had never written and to whom his Major 
had never returned when on leave, at least not for five 
years. He was greatly surprised. In fact you could 
have knocked him down with a feather. He had 
expected to see a handsome, rather aggressive woman, 
tall, a little heavy, who sat high and had a way of look¬ 
ing down at people as though they were, as he put it, 
“ Saturday night washers.” Instead of which, “ My 
Gum,” said he, “a pussy purr-purr, come and stroke 
me. A bloomin’ kitten,” and it was odd that he got 
instinctively the nick-name by which all the Rutland 
Gate boys had known her. He had seen great friendli¬ 
ness between them at their little table on the edge of 
the hugging square, but he knew deep down in his 
boots that the Major was not going to be taken back. 
He knew from what he had been able to glean that the 
wife had more money than the Major and that fact 
alone put a reunion out of the question. He took it 
for granted that Mrs. Beamish had come to America, 
as they had, in order to better herself, there being 
precious few decent men with money in England, and 
it seemed to him that a little woman who was pretty 
enough to take his breath away wouldn’t have much 
trouble in catching a young American with well-lined 
pockets. Then the Major would give her a divorce 
and be free. And if, in the meantime, he struck oil 
and married again it was a certainty that ’Arry ’Arris 
would be engaged as chauffeur and so continue to 
serve the man whom he loved better than a brother. 

On the question of striking oil, and getting oily, he 
possessed an idea that he put forth as he picked up and 
straightened out the clothes that Beamish began to take 


182 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


off on his way to bed. He said, “ I got into a bit of 
a chinwag with a cove round at the Y. an hour or two 
ago, sir. If ’e was on the level, and ’e looked it, Vs 
got something that may give us a start.” 

“ Oh,” said Beamish eagerly. “ What’s that? It’ll 
have to be something that any child can do. They’ve 
only made soldiers of us, remember.” 

“ Well, ’e’s wot they call ’ere a drummer, which is 
a commercial traveller in our talk, and was doin’ so 
well that ’e bought isself a Ford limousine to run 
round with ’is goods. Not bein’ a business man I 
couldn’t foller ’is reasons for the slump that knocked 
the stuffin’ out of ’im, but the result is that the car, 
as good as new, is on the market, at a knock down 
price.” 

“ I don’t see how that affects us, old man.” 

“ Well, ’ercourse I may be dippy but it come to me 
in a blindin’ flash that if we, — I mean you, bought 
that Jimmy o’ Ford and got a taxi license I could 
wangle it about the roads and make it pay for its 
beans and a bit over.” 

“By Jove!” said Beamish, standing up in his 
shorts. 

“ Like the idea, sir? We could paint it yeller, which 
seems to be the fashnable tint just now, and while you 
look about for the great job, a partnership in Morgans 
or the like, I could pick up enough with a bright smile 
and a gleamin’ taxi to settle the weekly bill at the Y.” 

Beamish gave a whoop and a rather pathetic excite¬ 
ment seized him. “ The only thing I know how to 
do,” he said, “ havin’ been lifted out of Oxford at the 
end of my first year, is to drive a car. And you’re a 
pro. By working in a series of reliefs, we could, 
between us, keep that machine tickin’ sixteen hours out 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


183 


of the twenty-four and perhaps achieve a few regular 
customers with what you call a bright smile. It’s a 
brain wave, old man, that’s what it is. And if nobody 
pushes us off the streets we may be able by close atten¬ 
tion to business to earn enough to buy another Ford 
and double the takings. It’s the way to get the air 
that we’re used to— I can’t see either of us sittin’ on 
an office stool even if we got the chance, — and there’s 
bread and cheese and bed in it anyhow.” 

“ I think so,” said ’Arry, as pleased as Punch to * 
have unearthed a practical scheme. 

“ All right then, we’ll go round in the morning, get 
your friend to let us inspect the Ford, and if it is as 
good as new take a risk and buy it, first of all finding 
out if we can get a license and how. Here’s to the 
possible foundation of the great taxi monopoly of V. 
Beamish and ’Arry ’Arris. I knew there wasn’t a new 
moon to-night for nothin’.” And he sent out a laugh 
that must have awakened the pigeons on the roof of 
the Grand Central. And once more Don Quixote and 
his Sancho Panza clicked and drank. 

“ Don’t know nuthink about a new moon,” said 
’Arry, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, 
stirred deeply at the alluring prospect suggested by 
his optimistic partner, “ but a bloomin’ spider let isself 
down from the ceiling just before you come in and 
looked me straight in the face, and if that ain’t a good 
sign I don’t know wot is.” 

It was an hour before these two gallant veterans, 
whose war services meant nothing more to a grate¬ 
ful Government than forgetfulness, went to bed 
that night. With the one unpurchased brick which 
might to-morrow turn out to be made of straw they 
built a Castle in Spain. And in a beautiful suite of 


184 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


rooms facing south, Beamish placed the Bluebird. 
’Arry ’Arris was mostly concerned about the garage. 

Little they dreamed, these two, that the winding 
line of life would eventually lead them into an im¬ 
broglio brought about by the imp on the shoulder of 
a girl of whom they had never heard. 


IV 

At precisely the same hour that night two other 
men whose friendship was just as good were sitting 
up together. Though for a very different reason. 

There had been a long and painful silence during 
which Pelham had sprung to his feet and gone for one 
of his characteristic walks between the solid furniture 
of his man-sized den. Malcolm, busy formulating 
further excuses for Beatrix, in which he was becoming 
an expert, watched him through a fog of smoke. And 
it seemed to him, in that midnight hour, that he was 
not the only watcher of his friend’s inarticulate dis¬ 
tress. With an imagination that was open to every 
impression, he told himself that the glassy stare of all 
the heads that marked the bachelor years of poor old 
Pelham had become less fixed from sympathy, and 
were also following the man who didn’t understand 
women and who knew, unfortunately, very much less 
about girls, up and down and all round the maze of 
furniture and bewilderment. 

The ugly truth was that Beatrix had not returned 
to dinner, and was still out on the road with that rotter 
Greenwood. It was utterly incomprehensible. More. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


185 


It was most cruel, most unwise, and incalculably 
dangerous. This was the great day, remember, to 
which Pelham had been looking forward with the 
excitement of a lover. All of it, hitherto, had been 
absorbed by other people and almost from the moment 
that Beatrix had made her carefully dramatic return 
to life most of it had been spoiled for him by an up¬ 
raised hand and the barrier of a grudge that had made 
him wonder whether the earth had performed a somer¬ 
sault. No one knew as well as Malcolm did that 
Pelham was a sound and simple man, without conceit, 
greatly and wonderfully in love, straining every nerve 
to be patient under strong provocation and disappoint¬ 
ment, doing his level best to be gentle and forbearing 
with the girl whom he had put through, as he thought 
of it, with the exaggeration of a highly sensitive 
nature, a crisis which, but for the grace of God and her 
own courage, she might never have come through. 
But, for all that, he had not been turned loose on the 
world without the ordinary amount of vanity that 
marks the one difference between a human being and 
an angel — so far as we can guess. And this, together 
with the pride that is connected with it by a short-dis¬ 
tance artery, had been hurt, awfully and terribly hurt. 
And that was bad. That, as everybody knows, was 
the springboard from which men dived into shallow 
water and broke their necks. Or, if they had the luck 
to dive flat — came out with so strong a smarting of 
humiliation, probably to the laughter of the crowd, 
that they took it out of themselves by diving again in 
the same dangerous place, with the deliberate intention 
of giving gruesome work to a reluctant coroner. Or, 
getting out of similes, which is always wise, put them 
into the temporary insane frame of mind that leads to 


186 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


a break in the delicate thread of marriage. “ I hate to 
say it,” thought Malcolm, “ but she’s a fool and is 
asking for trouble. Greenwood too. That utter 
waster, of whom Pelham is jealous because he has 
youth on his side.” 

“ Tve a damned good mind,” said Pelham, coming 
to a halt, “ to have my own car out and drive up to 
Town. Two people can play this game, y’know. It’s 
easy enough. And if she cares more about Green¬ 
wood than she does about me, let her have Greenwood. 
That’s all Tve got to say.” 

But it wasn’t by a long chalk. He had changed his 
dinner jacket for a bathing suit and was on the diving 
board. He was going to break his neck as sure as 
fate. 

“ That’s rot,” said Malcolm, “ and you know it.” 

“ Do I? I’m thirty-five and he’s in the early twen¬ 
ties. They’d make a fine couple. Youth to youth, and 
all that sort of thing. You know these cursed truisms 
better than I do. You probably wrote that one your¬ 
self. I’ve got my bachelor rooms still, because there’s 
no place here for all the old stuff. I can make myself 
perfectly happy in them until I hit on a plan for a 
little enjoyment, for a change. Look at that round 
faced clock, if you’ve got any eyes left in your head. 
Can’t you see that she’s been gone since half past 
five and that it’s now ten minutes past twelve? By 
God, it’s . . . it’s . . .” 

And under his violent kick the leg of the table 
quivered with pain. And so did his foot. It always 
does, especially when the leg of the table helps to 
support an antique. 

But beneath all this anger there was an acute 
anxietv. Not under the most diabolical of medieval 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


187 


tortures would he have confessed to this, even to Mal¬ 
colm, but with every minute that added cold-bloodedly 
to the hours of Beatrix’s delayed appearance the poor 
devil saw new pictures of accidents. Greenwood, that 
reckless conceited ass, had taken a dangerous corner 
on two wheels at eighty miles an hour, dashed into 
a telegraph pole and thrown Beatrix head first into a 
pile of stones. He didn’t give a tinker’s dam for the 
fact that smart Alec was as dead as a squashed frog, but 
when a far too vivid imagination led him to the place 
where that lovely thing lay, all crumpled. . . . Or, 
going blindly down a cul-de-sac, because he was, of 
course, one of those men who never took the trouble 
to know the road, Greenwood had telescoped his 
idiotic car against a wall, and Beatrix, unable to save 
herself . . . 

Outwardly as phlegmatic as an Englishman, and as 
cool as a fish in any trouble that concerned himself 
physically, Pelham was one of those people so sensi¬ 
tively strung that he attended funerals the day before 
they took place, entered operating rooms at the sight 
of a doctor who had come to give a simple prescription 
to anyone of whom he was deeply fond, and felt the 
surgeon’s saw at work on his own leg at the news 
of an accident to that of any man to whom he was 
devoted. For two hours, therefore, it followed that 
he had seen Beatrix killed in every one of the conceiv¬ 
able ways that his imagination could invent, and had 
been wifeless a hundred times in that agonising period 
of time. It is asking almost too much of such a man 
to love as he loved. 

And it was because Malcolm knew all this, as he 
knew every one of the workings of Pelham’s mind, that 
he sat tight under the abuse and sarcasm, held his 


188 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


peace and accepted the blame, humbly and with con¬ 
trition, as a good friend must. But what he willed 
with all the concentration of one who sits in front 
of a sheet of paper on which, with any luck, a verse 
will grow, was that when Beatrix eventually became 
ashamed of her fooling and walked into the room 
with the moonlight in her hair, Pelham would open 
the floodgates of his wrath upon her and make her 
pay up to the last cent for that unnecessary and unfor¬ 
givable escapade. 

If, getting out of the shell of his reserve, he had 
had the wisdom to advise his friend to adopt this 
course, and had coached him in the sort of thing that 
he should say, the imp would have dropped from 
Beatrix’s shoulder, the day would even then have 
become great, although it had taken its place among 
the yesterdays, and the spirits of all the men who had 
made friendship good would have erected a monument 
to his everlasting fame. If, — the little word that 
might have changed the current of history and written 
the story of many failures in very different words. 

All the windows were open, so that the first aggres¬ 
sive sound of Greenwood’s advertising car might be 
heard. It was one of those rare nights that only come 
in May, breathless and magical, when the young 
summer, like a lovely girl, sleeps in beauty. The scent 
of flowers hung upon the air. The silence was not 
broken even by the murmuring of leaves. Not a cloud 
drifted across the bewildering pattern of stars. The 
bosom of the earth rose and fell in deep, regular 
breathing. 

And when Pelham spoke again it was to say, “ Go to 
bed, old man. Why should you wait up? If I could 
sleep tonight I should turn in. Beatrix isn’t interested 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


189 


in me. I hate to see you sitting there, getting cursed 
and having a rotten time, for which Em frightfully 
sorry. You can’t do anything more than you’ve done 
already, except thank God that you’re a bachelor. I 
only wish that I could do the same.” 

But he didn’t. It was a feeble thing in lies. What 
he did wish was that the whole of the day might have 
been spent with Beatrix on the Galatea, with a great 
space of water between the family and Greenwood 
and that grudge which was so difficult to understand. 
In his amazing simplicity he believed that this would 
have made things different. 

But even on the Galatea far out to sea or in an 
aeroplane high above the house of Vanderdyke and 
the Greenwood’s yelling car, Beatrix would have had 
her mood with her, that untranslatable yearning for 
what goes by the name of Romance to those who are 
passing through the intermediate stage between ado¬ 
lescence and womanhood, — brief, tragic, wonderful, 
made up of glamor and passion and infrequently 
realized dreams which can be suffered or enjoyed by 
those who have not crossed the Rubicon, even although 
they have had a baby, and, therefore, by all the canons 
of unimaginative conventions should have outgrown 
the queerness of virgin youth. 

The hard fact remained that whether at sea, in the 
air, or under his own roof, it was for Pelham and 
only Pelham to find the one medicine that could effect 
the cure, —because this was a sort of illness, the first 
change of life, — and thus enable Beatrix to become 
normal, and responsible and sober, as she was really 
most anxious to do. Very intricate and very simple, — 
but it was one of the effects of nature that made so 
intimate a relationship between a man and a woman 


190 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


as marriage a touch and go business, balanced on the 
tip of a feather. 

Needless to say, Malcolm did not go to bed. He 
too, like ’Arry 'Arris, was numbered among the 
Sancho Panzas. He, too, had stood in a hideous flash 
of imagination on the lip of an open grave. 

He went over to the window and looked out at that 
beautiful but callous scene. “ Oh, my God," he said, 
“ where’s Beatrix? ’’ 


V 

Less than a quarter of a mile from Pelham’s house 
was a hill at the foot of which lay a wide panorama 
of open country, and on the top of this, with the 
moonlight in her hair, seated in the much-abused 
Greenwood’s abominable car, there, if you please, was 
Beatrix. And there, to the joy of an overworked 
engine, on that precise spot, she had been since half 
past nine. 

The eager Greenwood to whom, after a brief burst 
of public cordiality, she had been a thousand miles 
away, had frequently asked himself why. The aston¬ 
ished car, which, once out of its garage, was used to 
being worked into a lather, had echoed the question, 
and Beatrix herself, standing outside of her mood, 
had more than once demanded of what she liked to 
call her imp what in the name of all that was inex¬ 
cusable he was forcing her to do. “ You’re a fool, 
you’re a fool," she told herself with contempt. “ You’re 
playing a bad and foolish game, of the silly rules of 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


191 


which you ought to be thankful to say Pelham is 
entirely ignorant. If he weren’t he wouldn’t be Pel. 
He would be a man who must have come to you 
secondhand. He doesn't understand and he never will 
understand. You’re putting him through a form of 
torture for which you ought to be spanked. You’re 
trying to do one of those queer things that can’t ever 
be achieved. It’s a forlorn hope. It failed the very 
moment that it came into your head. Don’t hang 
on to this girl thing. Drop it, let it go, and be a 
woman.” 

But it was all very well to talk like that. The idea 
had become fixed. She had been thinking about it 
and building it up from the moment that she had told 
Pelham to go and tried to make him stay. It had 
grown and grown through all the days and nights of 
her subjection to the baby, through every hour of her 
convalescence, to the time when she made her self¬ 
consciously dramatic return to the ordinary routine of 
life that day. It had mastered her. She had become 
the slave to a mood. It was hopeless to endeavor to 
unfasten her shackles. 

And so there she was, on top of the hill, almost 
within shouting distance of the house behind the trees, 
playing the girl game for the very last time, perhaps 
to the bitter end. 

A most peculiar evening. Very pleased with himself 
and the sudden turn of events, thrilled, as far as he 
could still manage to be thrilled, at being taken up by 
Beatrix again, and prepared to perform all his well- 
practised tricks of charm and sympathy to make this 
the first step to a delicious intrigue, the ever-green 
Greenwood had started off well. After the initial, 
“ How Wonderful to see you again, how Gorgeous you 


192 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


look,” and the sort of thing of which this type of 
dancing hound is past-master, saying, even then, a 
hundred per cent less than he conveyed by his roving 
and caressing eyes, Greenwood had let his car go in 
order to achieve two generally irresistible results. The 
first to win the admiration of his companion for his 
skill as a driver. The second to send so powerful a 
current of air through her brain that all its cobwebs 
would be blown away and a sense of reckless exhilara¬ 
tion put in their place. It was usually a very successful 
scheme. He had known the primmest girl to lose her 
balance as well as a good deal of her caution by what 
he called the air-cure. And then, continuing the treat¬ 
ment, he had slowed down to a humdrum forty-five 
and had gone on with his How Splendid this and How 
Delightful the other, and will you swear you’re quite 
comfortable, and that you’re glad you came, until he 
considered that the moment had come for a little 
dinner in a quiet place where wine was to be had. 
And up to that point he had flattered himself that the 
cure was going well. The inoculation seemed to be 
taking. Beatrix had returned his smiles, had mur¬ 
mured satisfactory replies to his boyish Greenwood- 
isms, and had laughed under the refreshment of high 
speed. 

But the fine edge of this youth’s fastidiousness had 
been worn down long ago by his indiscriminations, 
especially since the Armistice, and his suggestion as 
to dinner in a gaudy looking Road House with its 
advertising boards and tortured wood, its blazing beds 
of pink geraniums and whitened stones, was his first 
mistake. He thought in terms of chorus girls. The 
“ Oh, thanks, no,” was kind but firm, and although 
it made him kick himself for a first-class fool, the 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


193 


“ I think we’ll wait for supper when we get back late,” 
had warmed him back to confidence and supper — late. 
Vast possibilities were opened up by those two words. 
They were to be alone for hours then, and when the 
peeping eye of day had closed . . . 

No. Nothing doing. Had he lost his touch, or 
what? Or had he fallen down to a reasonable speed 
before the cure had been effected? Until the stars 
came and the shadows melted away he had continued 
in his well-worked formula. More speed, a pause for 
flowery boyishness and then speed once more. Finally 
the brief order to take the car to the top of the hill, 
anchor there and watch the panorama pass from its 
daytime look with open fields and patches of woods, 
villages tucked away among the ups and downs, the 
high thin steeples, to its night appearance with lights 
gleaming here and there away below, like stars reflected 
in dark pools — and silence. 

And then had come, at last, with everything to help, 
the sad story of a broken heart, the “ oh, my Gods ”, 
the ‘‘If only you had nots ”, the “ I might have been 
a better man ” and such like. Wonderfully well done 
and not without a certain amount of genuine sincerity. 
The boy had really crashed at this girl’s feet. . . . But 
he might just as well have been speaking to a spirit 
as to Beatrix. For there she sat with her chin in her 
hands, her fair hair gleaming in the pale light, looking 
through the dark veil into — what? To-morrow? If 
not to-morrow, certainly not into a day in which he, 
Greenwood, mattered as much as a village boy with 
milk, or an old man begging for a crust. Pathos with 
a flick of passion, ruined hope with a plea for recon¬ 
struction, everything, every one of those well-turned 
phrases, some of which he had never used before, 


194 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


fluttered to the ground and burst like unhit clay 
pigeons. Hell, what was the idea ? Why had he been 
brought out, kept out, hour after useless hour, done 
out of an admirable dinner, good wine and an excellent 
cigar, a talk with Franklin who was, even as a husband, 
a well-known sportsman, and general comfort? 

Why . . . why? 

And why, after never a word of thanks or praise 
or pity, was the order given suddenly to “ Drive home, 
quick, — quick, I tell you. I want to get home ”, as 
though from a puritanical girl who expected to be 
locked out by irate parents. 

Greenwood gave it up, but, with thoughts of supper, 
he sent the car down that hill and round that corner 
and all along the straight into Franklin drive as though 
it were possessed by the devil. And because that 
habitually unsurprised young man had evidently not 
been sufficiently astonished that night Franklin came 
forward as the car drew up and having handed out his 
wife with frozen politeness beckoned to the footman 
who lurked in the lighted hall. 

“ Oh, Greenwood,” he said, “ so that you may not 
be kept up very much later by packing your things 
here they are, all ready. Put them in, Jackson, will 
you ? The clubs will go in front as well. That’s right. 
You’ll have the roads to yourself all the way home. 
Goodbye.” 

And then, taking the breathless Beatrix by the arm 
and leading her forcibly in he slammed the thick front 
door. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


195 


VI 

Breathless? Of course she was breathless. That 
iron hand upon her arm, even more than the faultless 
way in which he had packed young Greenwood about 
his business, might be the desired answer to her game 
of stand-off please-come-on. After all, then, that 
horrid drive and that deliberate waiting might have 
had the planned effect of turning Pelham into the King 
of Beasts. His beginning was good, was exactly 
right, was stirring. The axe, the shoutings, the 
seizing and flinging, the brief return to the primeval, 
— oh, Pelham, go on, go on. The bridge would be 
crossed by the morning, the intermediate stage left 
behind for ever, the flag of peace run up to fly above 
the house. It’s all so simple, darling, even if it’s all 
so silly. It’s only girl. For the last time give me 
Romance, in capital letters, and I’ll be good, I swear. 

He swung her away from him roughly and his eyes 
were black with anger. Who could have failed to 
hear that rattle-banging car as it came along the road 
hell for leather and arrived by a miracle at the house? 
“What the devil have you been up to?” he said. 
“ Of all days, to-day.” 

By Jove, he was going on, pricelessly, to perfection. 
And she smoothed her sleeves and threw her hat at a 
chair and turned a cool, supercilious chin. “Up to? 
I don’t .finite know what you mean? ” 

“ Then if you don’t you’re not worth loving, you’re 


196 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

not worth going through tortures for, you’re not worth 
living with.” 

Malcolm, standing on the threshold of the smoke 
filled den willed him on. “ Go for her, go for her,” 
he shouted in his throat, “ hurt her, humiliate her, 
make her pay, so that she will never play the fool 
again.” 

And Beatrix, the outward contradiction to her 
thoughts, echoed those words, that urging, the prayer, 
stood chin-tilted, eyes laughing, don’t-care-two-cents 
round her mouth, moon cool, amused though slightly 
annoyed, the world her property, this man merely an 
irrational and kill-joy husband. 

“ Have it your own way,” she said. “ I think I’ll 
have some supper.” 

But he stopped her as she hoped he would and stood 
aghast. And that was bad. 

“ Oh, God,” thought Malcolm, “ He’s going weak! ” 

“You mean that, — after everything that we've 
been through?” 

What could she do with this sensitive man who had 
faced machine guns with a to-hell-with-you grin and 
fell to pieces at unkindness from her? Never so much 
as at that moment had she longed to throw her arms 
round his neck and cry, “ I love you, I love you, I 
adore you,” and kiss him till he swam. 

She shrugged her shoulders. “ I always say what 
I mean,” she said. 

And there followed the fatal pause, the clatter of 
fallen weapons, the hurt that spurted blood. 

“ Go on, go on,” cried Malcolm, willing the veins in 
seams on his temples. 

“ Oh, my dear,” thought Beatrix, “ if you only knew 
something of women and one little thing about girls.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 197 

“ Then that settles it,” said Pelham. “ A great day, 
this! ” and he turned and left the hall. 

And Beatrix, herself aghast for a change, ran to 
the door that he had shut behind him, to listen, with 
her heart in her mouth. 

And out came Malcolm, the friend and the man 
who loved to the end of loving. 

“ It’s broken,” he said. “ Oh, damn, it’s broken.” 

“ What’s broken?” 

“ The thread, the delicate thread that holds a mar¬ 
riage together. Oh, Beatrix, you fool.” 

And she whirled round at the poet in goggles, the 
butt of a friend, and hammered his chest with her 
fist. “ You don’t understand. You don’t understand, 
either of you. It was a game, the last of my games, — 
the death of my youth, the crossing of the bridge.” 

“ Sssh,” he said. 

And at the sound of a car that rounded the house 
and passed the house and went as fast down the drive 
as Greenwood’s, she went as white as a ghost, as white 
as a dove, as white as death. 













I 







PART VI 


I 

A wife may play many tricks upon a man and hold 
his love. She may run riot through his money, edge 
his friends away until he stands at her side alone, 
transplant him from his old ground, change the current 
of his thoughts and blast the roots of his principles. 
She may, so that she is kind and exercises with gen¬ 
erosity the allure of her sex, remake his character, alter 
his interests, and lead him down strange paths without 
a struggle, as the stories of so many lives have proved. 
But let her hurt his pride and sense of fairness by 
manufacturing an excuse to withhold herself from him, 
and, however deep in love he may be, the foundations 
of marriage give way and the whole thing comes down 
with a crash. 

There is no human relationship that is put to so 
many tests as that which exists between a man and 
a woman who live together, whether it has been entered 
into with the greatest caution after a long engage¬ 
ment during which both parties have tried honestly 
to disclose themselves, or rushed into impetuously on 
nothing more than a slight acquaintance. The thing 
called love, which overwhelms the common sense of 
the most experienced men and women, as well as of 
the young and hot-blooded so that they bind them¬ 
selves with a legal knot before they have discovered 
whether they are composed of the innumerable char- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


200 

acteristics that are going to make them like each other 
after the first ecstasies are over, has many interpreta¬ 
tions. It is used mostly with indiscrimination and 
carelessness when the real word is passion. When a 
marriage is based solely on that, the end is in sight 
before the unhappy couple has left the altar steps. 
It is much less frequently used in its definite dictionary 
sense as a compound affection consisting of esteem, 
benevolence and animal desire, and when that defini¬ 
tion can be applied truly to the married relationship 
there is every hope of its success. But, even then, only 
if esteem and benevolence long outlive animal desire 
and the words to like and to respect are there to be 
linked tight to those of to love. And it must be remem¬ 
bered that there are several distinctions between to 
like and to respect which add to the infinite difficulties. 
It is possible for a man to love a woman for whom he 
has great respect and dislike her very much. The 
animal desire that rushed him into marriage may live 
for years and keep him from desertion and infidelity, 
while, at the same time, certain of his wife’s manner¬ 
isms, habits or methods may make her the most unlik- 
able creature on earth to him. She may, although a 
good and estimable woman, have an atrocious accent 
and a way of repeating the current catch phrase on all 
occasions so that his ear is jarred beyond endurance. 
She may go in for grotesque clothes, — poor dear 
imitative soul, — such as are to be seen in the windows 
of all fashionable dressmakers, wear nodding plumes 
in her hats like those that used to be sported by funeral 
horses, or do her hair in a way that makes him uneasy 
and self-conscious in public places. She may be one 
of those humorless women who play baby with other 
men, or one who, with the grim determination to 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


201 


appear intellectual, browses on the books of the little 
clever people and echoes their faddism at every oppor¬ 
tunity. She may have adopted too loud and frequent 
a laugh, or think it amusing to pull down the fourth 
wall of her house and indulge in bedroom stories about 
her husband from the opposite end of the dinner table. 
She may be possessed of the incurable habit of con¬ 
ducting insane badinage all through a game of bridge, 
or become a victim to the most tragic of all domestic 
vices and sing. Indeed, the ways in which she may 
get most horribly and most frequently on the nerves 
of the man who marries her for the third ingredient 
of the dictionary’s compound are many and various, 
and even when they appear to be most trifling to the 
looker-on can very quickly become so offensive to his 
sense of fastidiousness as to make marriage a painful 
and calamitous business. It is equally possible for a 
woman to marry a man whom she desires out of all 
reason and eventually to find herself utterly unable 
to bear his constant association because of certain of 
his manners. He may, for instance, insist upon 
smoking a pipe in her bedroom, or clipping his 
moustache over her dressing-table so that her powder 
box is filled with short, sharp hairs. He may form 
the habit of interfering with the servants or become a 
golf fiend and desert her over every week-end. He 
may have no ear for music and persist in whistling the 
popular airs all over the apartment in a way that 
encourages a constant desire to scream, or he may 
bring carelessness to a fine art and put his corn plasters 
on her tooth-brush, which is enough to make the most 
long-suffering woman pack her things and go back to 
her mother. 

Then, too, it is possible for a man to like and respect 


202 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


a woman very much indeed and never be moved to 
love, and for a woman to love a man and never be 
stirred to passion. And, again, if two people marry 
and it turns out by accident that they are endowed 
with precisely the same characteristics they are likely 
to bore each other to extinction before many years 
have passed, and long, with human contradiction, for 
disagreement; whereas if they marry and quickly 
discover that they disagree on almost every point of 
discussion there can hardly ever be even the regulation 
breathing space between their constant bouts of fight¬ 
ing. Marriage under any of these conditions is a 
very trying and difficult relationship and must develop 
either into a state of armed neutrality or open and 
declared hostility. It is very rarely conducted with a 
mutual tolerance that ensures a certain amount of 
peace and mild happiness. In fact, except for the 
rare and beautiful instances that every one of us 
knows, admires and envies, is not marriage, as Emer¬ 
son asked, “ An open question when it is alleged, from 
the beginning of the world, that such as are in the 
institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish 
to get in? ” 


II 

What of Franklin and his marriage, which had 
stood so good a chance of being numbered among the 
rare and beautiful instances, and for the continued 
success of which that little band of interested people 
hoped and prayed, the Vanderdyke father and mother, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


203 


Aunt Honoria, the little brown woman, Elizabeth 
McKenzie, the poet in goggles, and the Wonder him¬ 
self, who probably did more thinking between sleeps 
than even his admirers imagined was possible? 

Well, the thin thread had been broken. There was 
no doubt about that. Beatrix, not quite sane because 
she was suffering from the change of life that takes 
place at the end of girlhood, had set out to hurt her 
man a little in payment of the grudge that had grown 
and grown in a queer contradictory corner of her mind 
while she was waiting for her baby, and had suc¬ 
ceeded in hurting him so much that he had walked out 
and left her. He had said to himself, “ All right, 
it’s over. I’m turned down, kept off, refused. There’s 
no justice in it. Not a cent’s worth of excuse for it. 
I’ve done nothing that I wasn’t told to do and that with 
the greatest reluctance. At the end of my waiting, 
after pain and terror and thankfulness, up goes a 
stone wall. All right, it’s over, because I’m not climb¬ 
ing. I can take nothing that isn’t given. I’m not a 
thief and I’m not a bully. Either I’m wanted or I’m 
not. And if I’m not, I’m out. Well, I’m out, and 
that’s the end.” 

And from the moment when he drove his car out 
of the garage and headed for his bachelor rooms in 
New York to the ghastly moment when he put his 
latchkey into the door of a place which, a little over 
an hour before, had belonged to a time that had been 
folded up and put completely away by marriage, a 
time filled with good memories but lived and done 
with, he was going from the end to what? “ God 
knows,” he said over and over again. “ I don’t.” 
All he knew was that he was out. All he could say 
was that it was over. He was not a thief and he was 


204 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


not a bully. She had put up a stone wall and he wasn’t 
climbing. That was the end. 

And as he drove along those deserted moonlit roads 
back to a dead past, by way of several detours that 
merely lengthened his tragic journey by a mile or two, 
anger, humiliation, and over and above these, a deeply 
wounded pride went every inch of the way with him. 
A wonderful ending to the great day — ye Gods! 
A lonely policeman smoking a pipe; a man in too- 
tight trousers fixing a new tire to a car on the edge 
of a ditch; villages with a belated light here and there 
among the small houses packed as close together as 
sardines in a tin; a mechanical piano in an unhappy 
road house; the High Streets of small towns almost 
asleep but for a lurking figure or two, — and then 
the long dreary entrance into the great octopus city 
through the colored quarter, the Jewish quarter, past 
rattling trolley-cars, wild taxicabs, automobiles and 
dust. 

Dust that was so thick on the curtainless windows of 
those long-deserted rooms that the stars above the 
golden cock crowing on top of the fantastic building 
that strained its neck to touch the sky were as dull 
as though seen through a veil. Dust that made a carpet 
on the carpetless floors so that every foot-mark left 
an impression as on smoke-grimed sand. Dust that 
dulled the once virginal whiteness of the cloths bound 
round the heads of elk, wapiti, caribou and red-deer 
which made them look as though they were suffering 
from an epidemic of mumps, and toned down the red 
brown of still odorous tar paper strung to all the chairs. 
Dust that furred the tops of books and sideboards 
and pictures and gave the baths the appearance of 
being relics of Atlantis. Everywhere dust, so that 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


205" 

this place seemed to represent to this man the sepulcher 
not only of bachelorhood but of married life, the ruins 
of his love, his joy, his passion, which were blended 
in dust together where human folly slept. 

He had not stopped to think that it would be as 
impossible to live in these rooms in their present 
condition as among the debris of an old landmark 
that was in the unsympathetic hands of wreckers. 
Also he had come away without having pitched any¬ 
thing into a bag. And so there he was, homeless, a 
tree torn up by the roots. There he was, with all his 
money; with that charming old house which he had 
just, in a sort of way, kicked over, with a yacht as 
big as a young liner lying in the river, and with this 
horribly expensive apartment in a state of chaos, with¬ 
out a pillow upon which to rest a tired and angry head. 
It was enough to make a cat laugh. It was perfectly 
true that the Plaza was only fifty strides away and that 
there were dozens of other hotels within five minutes’ 
walk. But was he going to present himself to any of 
their gaping clerks in the wee small hours without a 
bag of any sort and ask for a room? He would be 
shot first. “ Damn everything,” he said to the echoing 
walls. “ I’m no better than a poor devil of a hobo. 
I’m utterly down and out and all I can do is to walk 
the streets or go round to the garage and camp in the 
car.” And this, with precious little appreciation of 
the perverted humor of the thing, he started out to do, 
banging the door of his dust-covered apartment and 
taking with him into the now almost deserted Avenue 
a feeling of ultimity that made every step the one 
that would bring him to the edge of everything. And 
the brief quietude that lay over the noisiest city on 
earth did a good deal to encourage that queer sen- 


206 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


sation. There was something unreal, almost mystic, 
in the fact that the blood had ceased to flow in that 
congested mass of arteries, and that its huge body, 
worn and nervous and exhausted, lay stretched out 
in momentary peace, like Gulliver over whose pegged- 
down limbs uncountable Lilliputians had ceased to 
swarm, yelling and struggling and getting into each 
other’s way. Uncanny, unbelievable. 

And when, presently, he walked into the vault-like 
place that reeked of gasoline and motor oil, went past 
the night man who had gone to sleep on a broken- 
backed chair with his close-cropped head against the 
wall, found his way to the car which had carried 
him out of marriage into the loose end of nothing, 
the rows of static machines whose job in life it was 
to move added again to the peculiar unreality into 
which he had fallen. The light was not too dim to 
prevent him seeing the “ No Smoking ” notices that 
hung conspicuously on the walls, and so, without the 
comfort and companionship of a pipe, he got into his 
car and sat there with his legs stretched out, his hand 
in his pockets and his eyes on failure. 

And that is what a girl can do for a man — any girl 
for almost any man, especially the one who doesn’t 
understand the unexplained and often unexplainable 
phases through which she passes, — the excitement of 
the mind that catches her at a moment when she is 
not quite normal; the emotion, breaking out like an 
illness, that is directed to the attainment of a sensation 
from which pleasure, sensual, intellectual or spiritual, 
is expected; the passion excited by the love of love, o.r 
uneasiness at the want of it; the aspiration, the craving, 
the prayer. That’s what a wife can do for a too- 
sensitive, blundering man, who is unversed in the 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


207 


strange, childlike subtleties of women; who believes 
only in what he sees and is told, has pride, and an 
honest simple manner of looking at things, that renders 
him utterly unable to find his way among the mazes 
of contradiction that constitutes the feminine mind 
and makes marriage a touch and go business, a delicate 
thread that can be broken by a word, a sneer, or a 
rash experiment much more easily than by an act of 
disloyalty or an open fight. 

Poor old Pel! He saw himself too old for this 
girl, which hit him hard; but beyond and above that 
he saw himself as distasteful to her. She had told 
him so, after he had waited so long, and that had put 
him out. That was the end. He wasn’t a thief and 
he wasn’t a bully. And so it was over, because he 
was not the man to climb that sort of wall. The imp, 
invented by Beatrix as an excuse for her last and most 
reckless indulgence in girl-stuff, as she insisted upon 
calling it, and it was a most annoying phrase, had left 
her a grass-widow with a fatherless boy, and broken up 
a marriage that had had every chance of becoming a 
little garden in a wilderness. It was a damned shame. 


Ill 

It was at a moment the following day when Pelham 
was getting very badly in the way of the small army 
of cleaners and arrangers who had taken possession 
of his apartment that Malcolm walked in. 

All the way up in the train that was filled with com¬ 
muters reluctant to exchange the fresh beauty of the 


208 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


country for the hot pavements and bad smells of the 
city, Malcolm, very worried and anxious, had been 
working out a plan of attack. He was bound to think 
of it as an attack because, knowing Pelham through 
and through, he w T as certain that he would find a man 
whose anger and humiliation and wounded pride had 
built round him a Gibraltar of impregnability. 

He had not seen Beatrix that morning. She was 
not to be seen. In reply to his request for an interview 
Brownie had been sent down to say that Beatrix had 
not slept very well and was going to remain in bed 
until lunch. And, as may be imagined, there had been 
a volley of questions and answers between these two 
which had led nowhere and achieved nothing except, 
of course, to confirm the uneasy suspicion in the mind 
of the little brown woman that things were worse 
than they appeared to be. Like all those who have 
suffered so consistently from the great unkindness of 
life that their rescue by a loyal and benevolent friend 
seems to be too good to be true, poor dear Mrs. Lester 
Keene expected to see Fate stalk out of the shadows 
at any moment. She was utterly devoid of confidence 
and as pessimistic as a newspaper man. Going quietly 
into the sunny morning room in which Malcolm was 
waiting gravely she, in a crinkling black dress that 
looked home-made, delivered her message, and return¬ 
ing from the door which she had forgotten to close, 
had started off on her own account — rudely, because 
she was frightened. 

“ What’s the matter? ” 

“ Nothing.” 

“ Nonsense. You can’t put me off like that. Where’s 
Mr. Franklin?” 

“ Gone to town on business, I think.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


209 


“ No, you don’t. He has no business. And even 
if he had it wouldn’t be important enough to take him 
•away in the middle of the night.” 

“ You may be right, Mrs. Keene. I don’t know 
anything about it.” 

“ Why don’t you? You’re his friend.” 

“ I simply don’t.” 

“ You’re not telling me the truth. You know there’s 
something the matter. You know why Beatrix has 
had a bad night, when she never has a bad night and 
you wanted to see her now to plan something. You 
can’t deceive me.” 

“ I don’t want to deceive you.” 

“ You and Beatrix are both deceiving me. It’s a 
conspiracy.” 

To which Malcolm had been inclined to ask what 
the dickens she had to do with it and why on earth 
he and Beatrix and Pelham, or, for the matter of that, 
any other combination of persons, should indulge in 
anything so gratuitously stupid as to conspire against 
her. But he was too kind and too sympathetic to do 
more than deny the impeachment and assure her that 
everything was all right, “ perfectly all right.” 

“ I know better. If everything had been perfectly 
all right Mr. Franklin wouldn’t have left the house 
during the night that he had been waiting for all this 
time for anything on earth. That’s certain.” And 
having blurted out that quite unanswerable and, as it 
immediately struck her, much too daring remark for 
a woman of her consummate respectability, she had 
been overcome by self-consciousness and had retired 
chastely and with haste. Under different circumstances 
it would have been a most amusing exit. 

And so, inspired with the hope that he might be 


210 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


able to achieve something that would bring his friends 
together again, Malcolm went off without a word to 
anyone. His job, he told himself, hoping that Beatrix 
had been merely playing the fool, was to get at Pel 
before all the rocks that he must already have sur¬ 
rounded himself with had settled firmly into place. 
The opening remark which had cost him an infinity 
of thought was far from fortunate. 

Stepping over the brawny Irish woman who was 
scrubbing the threshold of the once familiar apartment, 
he made for the sitting-room where Pel was standing 
on an oasis of dust in the midst of the cleaning fluid 
that was being used upon the floor by two other hefty 
ladies, who wanted nothing so much as his absence. 
He met his friend’s expected glare with courage, and 
without any preliminary beating about the bush, spoke 
his carefully prepared line. 

“ I want you to know at once, old man,” he said, 
“ that I have not been sent to see you.” 

And that was so idiotic, so damned idiotic, that 
even the man who didn’t believe that he would ever 
be able to laugh again burst out laughing — which 
plunged the very kind but most successful blunderer 
into a perspiration of bewilderment. On the one hand, 
Beatrix, having deliberately worked up this desperate 
situation in order to indulge in a temperamental spree, 
had collapsed at the result. On the other, Pelham, 
who had gone to pieces in the face of Beatrix’s “ Ver- 
boten ” was already capable of giving a frightfully 
sound imitation of a laughing jackass. What the 
devil ? 

“ Sent to see me,” said Pel, as soon as he could, still 
maintaining his position on the rapidly dwindling oasis. 
“ That’s immense! Who should have sent you — 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 211 

Brownie? Young Greenwood?” And he went off 
into another painful guffaw. 

Malcolm s collar became hot. He had feelings, 
little as it seemed to be recognized. It appeared to 
be generally supposed that his metier in life was to 
play the thankless part of peacemaker and enjoy the 
role, to be ignored by Beatrix and treated as a moron 
by Pelham. “ If you want to know what Pm here 
for,” he replied shortly, “ on a day when the city’s a 
loathesome hole, get off that square of dust and come 
outside.” And he disappeared from the open door; 
stepped over the corsetless Irish form and went out 
into the small be-marbled space facing the elevator 
shaft. 

To which, after a pause sufficiently long to prove 
that he was entirely without curiosity Pelham followed 
him, and the well-expressed relief of the two scrubbers 
broke forth in the ripest Irish. To a working woman 
the presence of an unoccupied man about a house in 
the daytime is an outrage. 

The two friends looked each other over, and when 
Malcolm saw the tired eyes and creased clothes of his 
friend a great sympathy took the place of righteous 
indignation and revived his intention to move heaven 
and earth to bring about a reconciliation. He was, 
he confessed to himself, much as he loved Beatrix, 
on the side of Pelham in this unfortunate split, which 
made his job all the more difficult. 

But he didn’t say so. He went off at a rather 
brainy tangent, to convey the impression that he had 
decided to mind his own business and butt in to the 
marriage question no further. “ I’m going to cut my 
holiday short and get back to Paris,” he said casually. 


212 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ Good idea,” said Pelham. “ Wait a few weeks 
and I’ll go with you.” 

That was exactly what he didn’t want. He had 
come to take Pelham home, not to put three thousand 
miles of unruly water between his two best friends. 
“ But why a few weeks? ” he asked, to mark time. 

“ I must make this place fit to live in and see my 
lawyers. Then I shall be free.’’ 

The elevator stopped and the robot who worked it 
raised his eyebrows slightly. 

“ No thanks,” said Pelham, “ unless you’re going 
down, Malcolm.” 

“ No, I’m not.” 

The usual clatter of the cage and the sharp click 
of the door and the thing slid away. But the word 
“ free ” echoed from wall to wall of that small space 
like the discharge of a gun. It staggered Malcolm out 
of his badly assumed indifference and brought him 
back immediately to the root of this uncomfortable 
call. “ Do you mean to suggest that you’re going 
to take this to your lawyers without giving it another 
chance? ” he said, breathlessly. 

“ Wouldn’t you? ” asked Pelham, with a sort of icy 
bitterness. 

“No, I certainly shouldn’t. Good God, you can’t 
bring everything down with a clatter, like a bull in a 
china shop.” 

“ Can’t I? Why not? It’s perfectly simple.’ 

“ But — but isn’t there anything to be done to put 
your marriage back on at least some semblance of its 
old footing? ” 

“ No, nothing,” said Pelham. 

Malcolm gasped. “ But I don’t see — upon my soul, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 213 

I don’t see what’s happened to — to take you to these 
lengths.” 

Pelham emerged from behind his barbed wire fence 
and put his arm round Malcolm’s shoulder. Who 
could be rigid at the sight of an old pal giving an 
exact imitation of a pricked balloon? “ My dear old 
man,” he said, “ because you don’t see what’s happened 
to take me to the end of this thing and out the other 
side is that any reason to suppose that I don’t see it? 
Now look here. It was damned nice of you to hunt 
me up to have a shot at getting me to go back and 
eat humble pie and watch Beatrix play about with 
Greenwood, — Young Greenwood, ‘so suggestive of 
Spring ’, — but let me tell you at once that you can’t 
do it. You don’t see, the family won’t see, and prob¬ 
ably Beatrix doesn’t quite see, that it’s over, gone phut. 
But I saw it last night plainer than I ever wish to see 
anything again, so don’t let’s argue. It’s going to 
make an awful mess and put things badly on the blink, 
to say nothing of rotting the whole show for me. But 
I’m for all or nothing, and Beatrix went out of her 
way to make it dead clear yesterday that ‘ nothing ’ is 
the new watchword. All right then. There’s the end. 
I shall set her free as soon as it can be done. . . .” 

“ And then what? ” 

“ God knows.” He wanted, with the most poignant 
longing, to ask about the boy, but he couldn’t trust 
himself and let it go. As for Beatrix, he didn’t want, 
at the moment, to know about her. He could still 
see her, standing in cool and insolent defiance in the 
hall, eyes laughing, don’t-care-two-cents round her 
mouth. In all probability her eyes were still laughing 
and she was telephoning to young Greenwood — 
Greenwood, so suggestive of spring — to come over 



214 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


and tear up the roads with her. And it made him 
stick out his chin and bite hard on his determination 
to accept failure and wind things up. It was the only 
decent thing to do. 

But Malcolm made one more effort. He loved these 
two, and when he was away from them and sometimes 
permitted himself to live in a brief dream in which 
Beatrix lived in his house, his compensation for not 
having been lucky enough to have been the man chosen 
by her had always laid in the fact that the ideal of 
marriage had been realized by them. And there was 
that boy! . . . “ ‘ Nothing ’ may have been the watch¬ 
word last night,” he said. “ But when you left the 
hall to go to the garage, Beatrix flew at me, cried out 
that I didn’t understand, that neither of us understood, 

— and that’s true. We don’t, we’re blunderers. And 
so, before you go any farther, come back and see if 
the thread can be mended. Humble pie isn’t a bad 
diet and while you’re eating it for the sake of all these 
eighteen months and the result they’ve achieved you 
may understand enough to let the flag of peace, as 
Beatrix called it, fly over your house again.” 

Pelham shook his head. There was that wall and 
he wasn’t climbing. 

Malcolm warmed to his job, all the same, and cer¬ 
tain phrases that Beatrix had used during their talk 
the previous afternoon, and later, came leaping into 
his mind like reinforcements. “ She may have been 
getting something out of her system,” he said, “ play¬ 
ing a game, the last of her games — the death of her 
youth, the crossing of the bridge. I don’t know. We 
neither of us know. Perhaps she doesn’t quite know, 

— but give it a chance and come back. She’s fright¬ 
fully young, Pel, you must remember that.” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


215 


Blunderers both, poor devils, and that last remark, 
meant so well, stamped Malcolm as the bigger blunderer 
of the two. 

Out it came, that fool complex, touched squarely in 
the middle. “ Yes. Young Greenwood, — so sug¬ 
gestive of spring. Old son, chuck it. It’s hopeless 
to chew it all over. I’m out, I tell you. I understand 
that. The whole thing was a mistake. She had the 
pluck to let me see that and it’s over. Mafische.” He 
put his finger on the bell. 

“Oh, God!” said Malcolm. “What a damned 
shame. I looked at the success of your marriage as 
one of the few certainties of life.” 

To which Pelham had nothing to say. It wasn’t 
necessary because all his grief, homelessness and sense 
of failure made a sudden havoc of his anger and 
wounded pride. 

And when, after the elevator had come and gone, 
he went back into his ammonia-reeking bachelor quar¬ 
ters alone, even the oasis of dust, which, in a sort of 
way, had stood for the past, had been cleared away. 


IV 

What was the good of hanging about a blistering 
city and killing a couple of hours until lunch time in 
a club to which he went so seldom that servants looked 
at him with suspicion and asked him who he was? 
There might be a train to take him back to good air 
and a touch of breeze if he drove to the station at once. 
His mission had failed. 


216 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


And so Malcolm crossed the Avenue to the corner 
at present occupied by the very charming house with 
the uneven red roof which had been dwarfed utterly 
by the Gargantuan building on the opposite side, — a 
house upon which, without doubt, there were fixed 
several sets of eager desiring eyes, and towards which, 
in a city in which nothing is permitted to achieve age 
and tradition, many itching fingers were stretched out 
greedily for the opportunity to wreck and demolish. 
In his mind’s eye Malcolm could see a building higher, 
whiter, newer, more grotesque and characterless than 
the one with the Golden Cock, poking its head into the 
clouds on the place where that red-roofed landmark 
now stood by accident or grim determination. 

He hailed one of the shoals of yellow taxis that, 
all with different names, — their correct name was the 
Yellow Peril, — dodged about the streets like fish in 
a bowl, and drove to the Grand Central. By the skin 
of his teeth, but, unfortunately, with nothing to read 
in order to pass an all-stop journey, he caught a train, 
and after a bumping that seemed to have been spread 
over a week of ill-spared life found himself blinking 
and incredulous on the sun-spotted platform of his 
destination. 

A long drive brought him finally to the house of 
many wings in which he was immediately aware of 
being eyed inquisitively and anxiously by the various 
servants whose functions permitted them to appear 
on the face of things. The footman, who was on the 
doorstep at the first sound of the station taxi, searched 
his face for news. The butler who came forward 
merely to volunteer the information that lunch was 
about to be served, nothing more, put him through fifty 
seconds of microscopic examination. A maid, emerg- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


217 


ing from the kitchen, was dramatically arrested in the 
hall at the sight of dog marks on one of the rugs and 
while removing these with an elaborate demonstration 
of horror, seized the opportunity to read in his expres¬ 
sion the result of his unadvertised visit to the city of 
which everybody seemed to know. How it had got 
about that Pelham had left the house in the small 
hours of the morning didn’t matter. It was most 
obvious, even to short-sighted Malcolm, that the fact 
had been the sensation of the day, discussed and redis¬ 
cussed from every angle, and that the conclusion 
arrived at by the menage in general was that “ some¬ 
thing’s up.” The Great Day had not approached, been 
celebrated, and gone by without sympathetic under¬ 
standing by them as by Brownie. Why should it? 
Nature is just as human in livery as it is in Harris 
tweeds, and Romance is spelt with the same big R 
wherever it is imagined. 

But Malcolm was no actor. The depression that 
weighed in his heart was stamped upon his face. 
Everyone caught it, especially Brownie when she 
hurried out of her room like an ancient pheasant at the 
sound of his steps in the corridor. 

One eager look was enough. “ Ah,” she said, seeing 
the familiar figure of Fate. “ I thought so,” and went 
limp in that curious way of hers. 

A kind soul, Malcolm, very patient and humani¬ 
tarian. But somehow, Brownie got rather badly on 
his nerves. He disliked forboders. “ But it doesn’t 
follow that you always think right,” he said, with the 
deliberate intention of putting up a fight. 

“ It’s enough that you’ve come back alone,” she 
replied, with a sort of gloomy triumph. 

“ I went to town to see my publishers. Did you 


218 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

expect me to bring back a member of the firm under 
my arm? ” 

“ It’s no good, Mr. Fraser,” she said, with her fin¬ 
gers wide open, as though, in spite of those good 
eighteen months, peace and happiness were pouring 
through like water. “ I’m not to be deceived. Beatrix 
knows already.” 

“Knows what already?” Good Lord, anyone 
would think that this queer little, brown woman 
revelled in misfortune. 

“ I heard her run to her window when your cab 
drove up. She's seen your face, you know.” 

“ Oh, damn my face,” he shouted, as anybody would, 
and went past her to his room. 

It was perfectly true. Beatrix had seen the nice, 
ugly face of the poet in goggles because she had flown 
to the window of her bedroom as the coughing Ford 
made the incline from the gate to the house and stood 
chugging beneath. And like everybody else she read 
the word failure that was stamped upon it and im¬ 
mediately locked her door. It was the involuntary 
action of one who felt the instant need of barricading 
herself against the misplaced sympathy of Brownie or 
the belated reproaches of Malcolm. Besides, the fact 
that she rejoiced in Malcolm’s failure and would prob¬ 
ably have to say so to those amazed people would take 
too long to explain. . . . She had had, to begin with, 
a very bad night. She had not, as a matter of fact, 
attempted to cajole sleep or even make herself com¬ 
fortable by the removal of her clothes, as most women 
do, especially in a time of great emotional perturbation. 
She had sat up in the dark, dressed, wondering and 
wondering. For a long time she had had upon her the 
startled feeling that numbs the brain of a young thing 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


219 


who has put a light to a train of gunpowder with which 
to blow up a hiding place of branches and twigs and 
stands before the debris of an actual house. She was 
amazed at the power of this explosion which she had 
laid down with a too heavy hand, — awed even, for 
with the roof had gone the pole on which she had 
expected to run out the flag of truce that morning. 
Emerging from the thick of the smoke of this she 
had subjected herself to the soundest mental spanking 
of which her vocabulary was capable, and was a little 
astonished to discover in the process how many op¬ 
probrious words she knew. Then she had risen, 
bruised and humble, had cried a little as she paced up 
and down her lonely room, and had began to examine 
the position of things with the minutest care. Her 
temperamental spree, as Malcolm had called it, had 
ended in disaster. There was no doubt about that. 
But out of the ruins came, first, and that instantly, an 
enormous addition to her already great respect for 
Pelham. By refusing to stay under the same roof 
with her after her cold-blooded cruelty, the far-fetched 
reason of which he was incapable of understanding, 
as she ought to have known, he had done exactly the 
right thing, the Pelham thing, and she adored him 
for it. It showed strength, and with her strength was 
a fetish. It showed so much more character than the 
bandying of words and the sulky occupation of separate 
rooms, especially on such a day. More than that, and 
that was fine enough, she argued, it showed love, a 
greater love than he had already abundantly proved 
himself to possess. And wasn’t this the very thing 
she had set herself, in her roundabout way, to bring 
out? Of course it was. Hurrah, then things began to 
look up wonderfully! As for her, she found, as she 


220 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


went from stone to stone across the stream of argu¬ 
ment, that she had never loved him more ardently, 
more consummately or with a more perfect desire to 
give. It was true that the bridge of which she had 
spoken to Malcolm, and she might just as well have 
been speaking in Dutch — had broken in the middle, 
but she had crossed the stream by swimming, and 
girl stuff left behind, she was, she knew now, eager 
to play the part of a woman. Give her the chance! 
Very well then, what could result from this foolery, 
as he loved her and she adored him, but a kissing again 
with tears ? He might stay away from her for a day, 
or even two days, she told herself. Without prompt¬ 
ing from her, Malcolm would certainly go up as a 
peacemaker, and would fail. Of course, he would fail. 
And then she would go up wearing a new frock and 
humbleness, and in the simplest possible words tell 
him of the emotion that had broken out like an illness, 
the passion excited by the love of love, the last 
adolescent fling for Romance. Good Heavens, it was 
such a natural thing that anybody could understand 
it, even Pel, whose ignorance of women was incredible 
— but good. Yes, and then she would go up, and 
stepping out of all the egotism and arrogance that she 
had been trained to as though it were a frock, ask to 
be forgiven and cry out her love for him, and respect, 
and liking, and desire, and bring him home again. 
This was the first of their misunderstandings, — and 
it should be the last. 

Having arrived at this height, after dawn had 
broken through, it was absurd to think of sleep. She 
was far too happy to miss a fraction of a moment 
of it, and instead of going to bed went mentally 
through all the processes of dressing, leaving, going 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


221 


to town, confessing and being held against a blazing 
heart, over and over again. But finally, just as 
Brownie tiptoed in at eight o’clock, having herself 
enjoyed a very bad night after seeing Pelham go to 
the garage, of which her windows commanded a most 
excellent view, sleep took her forcibly to bed, and 
almost before she could slip out of her clothes put 
her out of dreaming. 

It was at a moment when Malcolm was halfway 
through an uncomfortable lunch, sitting opposite to 
Brownie, who, in the deepest gloom, sat as though she 
were making her last meal before leaving a sinking 
ship, that Beatrix entered, radiant. Very hungry too. 
A good appetite always follows upon a burst of 
emotion. 

“ Good morning, everybody. What perfect weather! 
Eggs and bacon, please.” She divided a smile equally 
between Malcolm and Brownie and the at-once-alert 
Alfred, and went on humming the latest popular fox 
trot, — an American version of a nice old German 
tune. How useful are the folk songs of that land of 
composers to the Broadway manipulators of musical 
plays. 

“ By Jove, what courage,” said Malcolm to himself 
as Brownie registered the fact that she was acting. 

“ Give me six bisques, Mally, and I’ll take you round 
the course this afternoon and whack you.” 

“ You’ll probably do that playing level,” he said, 
“ without much effort.” 

“Why? Are you trying to suggest that a trip to 
town has put you off your game? By the way, how’s 
Pel this morning? Did he enjoy his midnight drive? ” 

“ I didn’t ask him,” said Malcolm, rather shortly, 
hoping that Beatrix would take a hint and leave 


222 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Pelham out of any discussion until Mrs. Keene with¬ 
drew. He had made up his mind to report the result 
of his talk to Pelham without any attempt to minimise 
its gravity. If Beatrix’s high spirits were not mere 
bravado it would be his unpleasant duty to administer a 
shock. 

But Brownie held her ground to the very end of the 
meal, not out of curiosity, because the pessimism horn 
of a long series of misfortunes made her perfectly 
certain that things were in a parlous state, but simply 
in order to make Malcolm uncomfortable and sit on 
tenter hooks. She knew that he considered her to be in 
the way and besides being jealous of him she owed him 
one for his rudeness in the corridor. And so she sat 
tight, looking more and more like an old bird deserted 
by its young as Beatrix went gayly from one subject to 
another with no apparent realisation of the disaster 
that she had brought about. It was not until Beatrix 
rose and went out into the sun on the terrace that the 
little brown woman returned to her comfortable quar¬ 
ters to stand in the middle of her sitting room and 
wonder how soon it would be before she was uprooted 
and required to follow Beatrix back into the Vander- 
dyke house, in which she always had been tortured with 
a hideous desire to perform a series of irreverent antics 
in order to smash up the pompous monotony of royal 
retirement. It was certain that they couldn’t continue 
to live under Pelham’s roof after what must have 
happened last night. 

Then Malcolm, screwing himself up to break the 
news, went out into the sun. 

And Beatrix ran her hand through his arm and fell 
into step with him. She was in one of those thin 
silk canary-colored sweaters that only one girl in a 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


223 


million should venture. It went rather nicely with 
her hair it was true, but, was, nevertheless, a risky 
experiment. “ Let’s see. This is Wednesday,” she 
said. “ On Saturday morning I’m going to ask Pel 
to arrange to take me for a fortnight on the Galatea. 
I want to show baby all the islands on the way to Bar 
Harbor, too.” 

But Malcolm’s enthusiastic agreement with this 
nice domestic plan, for which she waited confidently, 
was not forthcoming. It was her way of telling him, 
in a few words, that she was going to use Thursday 
and Friday to bring about a complete reconciliation, 
and she put into her voice a quiet, wifely-motherly note 
which could not fail to prove to him that her tempera¬ 
mental upheaval had passed away, leaving her sane and 
contrite. 

“ Don’t you like the idea? ” she asked with a touch 
of impatience. 

Feeling like a man who has been sent to an unsus¬ 
pecting wife to tell her of the death of her husband, 
Malcolm fumbled for words. “ It would have been 
a good idea yesterday,” he said. “ But things have 
happened since then.” He was vague and awkward 
because, although his sympathies were all with Pelham, 
he felt like a butcher now that he was in the presence 
of this obviously repentant girl whom he loved to the 
end of loving. 

“ I know,” said Beatrix. “ But other things are 
going to happen before Saturday that will wipe them 
out. Don’t you gather that?” 

“ I’m afraid they won’t wipe them out, my dear. 
It isn’t so easy as all that.” 

Beatrix stopped and faced him. “ What do you 
mean?” she asked. Poor Old Mally! How little he 


224 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


knew about the power of women to make things easy 
when they choose to exert the full strength of charm 
and generosity as she intended to do during the next 
two days. Probably one would be enough, an hour 
of one. 

“ I mean,” he said, rushing to the point, “ that 
Pelham isn’t in the mood for the Galatea, Bee. When 
he left you last night — this has to be said — he didn’t 
leave you till to-morrow or Saturday. He left you 
for good.” 

Beatrix laughed. What absurd things had these 
two been saying, putting their funny old heads to¬ 
gether? She could see them making a mountain out 
of a mole hill, both grave and strong, and laying down 
the law through clouds of tobacco smoke, standing 
alternately in the limelight, until the moment when 
Pelham, announcing his ultimatum, sent Malcolm back 
to deliver it to her. It was a naive scheme to frighten 
her and make her rush to town in a frightful fatigue, 
there to be forgiven after a tearful apology and a 
declaration of love. Well, he should have it most 
sincerely. It was what he deserved. 

But the laugh angered Malcolm, because it seemed 
to him to show a heartlessness and flippancy that didn’t 
belong to this business. “ You’re going to be surprised 
to hear,” he said, “ that Pel's going to spend the next 
fortnight with his lawyers for the purpose of setting 
you free. After which he’s coming with me to Paris.” 
It was out, brutally. 

“ It’s a joke,” said Beatrix. 

“If you knew Pel as well as I do you wouldn’t say 
that. And you wouldn’t be able to say it if you realized 
how frightfully you hurt him yesterday. To all the 
arguments that I put up on your behalf — and I 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


225 


fought hard — he had only one statement to make. 
‘ It’s over/ he said. ‘ The whole thing was a mistake. 
I’m for all or nothing and she let me see that nothing 
is the watchword. I’m out. It’s over.’ And he is 
out and it is over. It’s too late for you to do anything 
to mend the thread. You’ve broken it, and it’s a 
damned shame.” And he turned away stirred to deep 
emotion, walked to the end of the terrace and stood 
looking down at the garden from which all the color 
seemed to him to have gone. 

And without an instant’s pause Beatrix followed 
him, put her hands on his shoulders and a laughing 
face within six inches of his own. “ I tell you that it’s 
a joke,” she repeated. “ What rot for him to say that 
he’s too old. Of course, he’s for all or nothing. So 
am I. The whole thing was not a mistake. It was 
and is the best and most wonderful thing that’s ever 
happened on this earth. He couldn’t set me free under 
any law in existence now or any that could be invented 
by the most spiteful brain to deal especially with me. 
I'll fight like a cat never to be set free. So, my dear 
old Mally, far from being over, it’s only just beginning, 
and I’ll bet you every blessed thing I have, and am 
ever likely to have, that Pel and I and baby go aboard 
the Galatea on Saturday morning for a little trip to 
Heaven. Will you take me? ” 

And when, in utter amazement, Malcolm backed 
away and looked at this young, wise, triumphant crea¬ 
ture with her hair gleaming in the sun, and her eyes 
full of laughter and assurance, he gave it up, he laid 
down his arms in a metaphorical pile in front of her 
and stood, as all men stand before such women, helpless. 

And he made such a comic-pathetic figure in his 
goggles and amazement that she laughed again, touched 


226 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


his cheek with her lips as a reward for his well-meant 
but useless efforts, and danced away to make her plans 
for an encircling movement upon Pel. 


V 

But, — and there is always a but — there were 
two factors in the existing state of this matrimonial 
affair which were not going to make things quite so 
easy as Beatrix took for granted. There was the 
wounded vanity that had not only rushed Pelham back 
to his bachelor quarters but had put him into the dan¬ 
gerous spirit that creates a hunger strike and makes 
a martyr. 

And there was our wee friend May. 

Having returned to town with Elizabeth McKenzie 
from the Vanderdyke house, May happened that after¬ 
noon to be undergoing the enforced rest cure that is 
always to be obtained when people are rash enough 
to attempt to drive up or down the Avenue. Seated 
in the McKenzie car, having dropped the enthusiastic 
Elizabeth at the headquarters of the Dug-Out, she 
was chewing the cud of bitter reflection. There was 
no doubt as to the fact that Beatrix, in their first 
bout, had knocked her under the ropes. With a cer¬ 
tain amount of admiration and sportsmanship she 
acknowledged her defeat and was already wondering 
upon which of the McKenzie’s men acquaintances she 
should commence the well-known tactics of the female 
spider. Pelham Franklin was not only too well pro¬ 
tected— by Jove, that grey-blue girl! — but was the 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


227 


possessor of the sort of single-track brain that she had 
never met in any other man. Never. He was out, 
bad luck to it. He would have been so precisely right 
too at this tricky stage of her career, with all that 
money. Well, it meant beginning all over again, — 
next time, if she could wangle it, with one of Mc¬ 
Kenzie’s banker friends who had passed into the 
dangerous age of forty-five, — a man who had been 
contentedly married for twenty years, had been so 
concentrated upon the making of money that he had 
had no spare moments in which to realize that all the 
best years of his life had been sacrificed and who, sud¬ 
denly panic stricken at the sight of white hairs and a 
bulging waistcoat, turns round and rushes back to 
catch the ecstasies of a desperate youth and falls head¬ 
long at the feet of spring. What a pity to have 
achieved Franklin’s friendship and admiration and 
then to have had “ Road closed ” put up by Beatrix 
in so completely capable a way. Ah, well, well, that’s 
what it was to be a parasite, one who worked harder 
to earn a living by not working than those who worked. 
In the only way open to her she would now have again 
to set about the realization of her life-long dream, — 
the beautiful house, the rare old furniture, the exquisite 
china, the soft-footed servants, the rustling gowns, the 
total freedom from sordid money worries. How 
crowded the Avenue was. In any other city, except, 
perhaps, Paris, in the Rue de la Paix, or the Boulevard 
des Italiennes, so many people would indicate the cele¬ 
bration of an event, — the return of a Royal son, the 
burial of a much-hated President, the triumphant con¬ 
clusion of a bloodless revolution. And how odd it 
seemed to pass a succession of the same profiles only 
to be passed by them when the blazing eye in the 


228 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


forehead of the police box brought all the cars to an 
abrupt standstill, and gave the great street the uncanny 
appearance of having been suddenly frozen. She 
became interested in one face and then another and 
presently in the small head and square shoulders of 
— no, yes — Pelham, walking aimlessly, with lips 
tight, under the well-known small moustache. Pelham, 
of all men, here in town, on such an afternoon, with 
something about him, all about him, that gave out 
depression and homelessness and the damn-all of one 
who had lost interest in life to so great an extent that 
it was a wonder that he was not followed by a 
procession of stray dogs and deserted cats and wan¬ 
dering failures. What in the name of all that was 
amazing . . . 

With a burst of short-lived energy the car swept 
by and with her head over her shoulder, like Lot’s 
inquisitive wife, wee May watched the tall wiry figure 
among the swarming humanity. And then, brought 
to a halt once more, saw him come on and on, with his 
eyes on the pavement, oblivious of everyone, until he 
passed, again, along the huge gully that was glorified 
by a sky as blue and cloudless as that which hung over 
Cairo. 

“ That rift,” she said to herself, with excitement 
and the hope that belongs to gamblers and antique 
dealers and women without bonds. “ It’s widened. 
There’s been a row. He’s hurt and angry and miser¬ 
able. Oh, ye Gods, for the chance to get even with 
that confident girl, that grey-blue girl, and find a 
slit in the armor of this one-eyed man! ” 

She opened the door of the stand-pat car and got 
out. “ Pm going to walk home,” she said. “ Perhaps 
you’d better go back and wait for Mrs. McKenzie,” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 229 

and away she went after Pelham like a fish against 
the stream. 

“ One of the crazy ones,” thought the chauffeur, to 
whom walking, when engines had conquered, was a 
fool’s game. 

“ Oh, hullo, Pel,’’ she said, touching his arm with 
friendly fingers. 

And like one who finds water in a desert Pelham 
stopped and turned and grasped the little hand. “ By 
Jove, this is good,” he said, thankful to discover 
among that surging mass of strangers one familiar 
face. “ What are you doing? Where are you going? ” 

“ Nothing — nowhere,” she answered, but with the 
old courageous smile. 

“ May I catch on? ” 

“ I wish you would. Pm desperately lonely.” 

“ So am I. Come to the Plaza and have tea and if 
you’re not doing anything to-night dine with me and do 
a show or something. Can you? ” 

Could she? Watch her jump! But to him, this 
man so eager for companionship who was accustomed 
to having his own way, it was loyalty to her sex not 
to be too easy. “ Not to-night, I’m afraid,” she said. 

“ Why not?” 

“ Well, I’m still with the McKenzies, you see, and 
I’ve a vague idea that I’m dining out with them.” 

“ Oh, scratch it,” he said, going forward with horror 
to an echoing apartment. 

“ I wonder if I dare.” 

“ Why not?” 

“ At any rate, I’ll come to tea, and when I see Eliza¬ 
beth and find exactly how things stand I’ll ring you up. 
She’s been so sweet to me I wouldn’t put her in a 
hole for anything on earth — even you.” She was 


230 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

utterly free and so could well afford to stand on 
rectitude. 

“ Thanks. I can’t stick this place alone. It gives 
me the creeps.” 

“Don’t I know!” she said, putting into her voice 
so pictorial an expression of sympathy and under¬ 
standing that no other words were necessary to paint 
her similar loose-endedness. 

“ This is good indeed.” 

And as they were caught in the tide that went 
sweeping up the street a sense of thankfulness pervaded 
both of them. 


VI 

And so they dined together. 

The place with a French name and French cooking 
and a small French orchestra that played small French 
tunes managed, in spite of all this conscious effort, 
to achieve an atmosphere that was almost French. 
Something of the artificial naughtiness was there, the 
cunningly simulated mechancete that is the keynote of 
every successful restaurant in the city of successful 
restaurants, — the lace on the windows, the numerous 
screens, the seclusion of corners, the subtle sympathy 
of the maitre d’ hotel, the faint suggestion of chypre 
and garlic, the inarticulation of another man’s wife. 
In spite, too, of the fact that Pol Roger came to the 
tables in cups. But it was Pol Roger and finally it was 
Napoleon brandy and the cups gave both an added 
flavor. 

They hadn’t much to say. There was no out- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


231 


pouring, no mutual burst of ego. Fourth walls were 
permitted tactfully to stand. But there was compan¬ 
ionship which put a welcome stop to introspection and 
broke the endless chain of inward argument. And 
there was the necessity to think for someone else for 
a change, which utter loneliness prevents. They said 
the sort of things that didn’t matter and laughed at 
nothing, taking care to skate very clear of the thin 
ice of confidence. It was as though both had become 
unhitched from the main line, and, while waiting to 
be taken on again, killed time pleasantly on the siding. 
Pelham worked for that mental and physical attitude 
and his wee friend May was quick to take the hint. 
She was as expert as a hardened stock actress in the 
picking up of cues. 

They dawdled, and, like people who saw the lock 
ahead at which they were bound to land, back-watered 
from time to time. They were, finally, almost the last 
of all the couples to be eyed with increasing impatience 
by tired waiters. But it was not until the little band 
of four musicians wound up their programme with 
“ J’en ai Marre ” and went away to eat, that Pelham 
reluctantly looked at his watch. “ I’ve got two seats 
for the “ Chauve Souris,” he said. “ Do you think 
we’d better go? ” 

“ Oh, I don’t know. Is it worth while now that 
it’s so late? I rather hate to go to a show when half 
of it is over. Can’t we wander in somewhere and 
smoke?” All the evening she had been willing him 
to take her to his rooms. There, in the quiet, she 
might tempt him into an explosion, a statement of the 
facts. Because something was up. She knew that. 
Something had happened to his domestic lute. There 
was, from her point of view, a most convenient rift, 


232 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


that was obvious. The man was wounded. There was 
shrapnel in his soul. She was a good little nurse. 

“ My apartment is livable once more,” he said, “ if 
it wouldn’t bore you there. A small army’s been at 
work all day. I can’t say more for it than that it is 
clean.” 

She began to gather up her things, — fan — it was 
very hot, — handkerchief, vanity case. She was one 
of those wise women who refrain from going through 
the rather too intimate processess of renovation before 
the man whose fastidiousness she respected. “Why 
not?” she said, casually. “Anywhere will do,— 
away from crowds and jazz. I know nothing that 
puts me into such depths of melancholy as the wailing 
oboe and the suicidal minor key of South Sea music.” 

And so Pelham paid the bill and removed the pained 
expression from his waiter’s face. And when he put 
the light cloak about May’s white shoulders, he noticed, 
for the first time, the sweet-pea coloring of her hair 
and face, the daintiness and delicacy of her body and 
frock, the unusual absence of jewels. What a tiny 
thing she was, with the pluck and courage, he remem¬ 
bered, of a man, — some men. 

Out in the dimly-lit foyer of that well-run place, 
Pelham was met by a maid with his hat, who wore 
the pour boire smile. The sympathetic maitre d’ hotel 
bowed them into the street. “ Enchante de vous 
revoir ” he murmured, adding without words but with 
the merest turn of the hand, “ Remember, we are dis¬ 
cretion itself.” 

The night was clear and fine, but the day’s heat still 
clung to the deep gullies of the city, and the carbonized 
air was dead. They turned into Madison Avenue 
somewhere in the middle Forties and walked slowly up. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


233 


The countless little shops that exhibited a chair, a 
screen and a piece of brocade, though closed, were 
lighted up and gave the street frequent notes of color 
and cheerfulness, — except perhaps to those who won¬ 
dered how they lived. The nerve-wracking smash and 
rattle of the trolley-cars seemed harder and more 
blatant now that other traffic had almost ceased to 
compete. 

“ You’re going home to-morrow, I suppose, — lucky 
man, to have such a charming place.” She dropped 
the remark in the tone of one who didn’t really want 
to know but spoke to keep the ball going. 

“ No,” said Pelham shortly. 

A quick glance showed the tight mouth under the 
small moustache. He was not yet in the mood to open 
up and she was not so tactless as to force her foot into 
a door that he would resent her opening. But her 
heart jumped at his answer, and her spirits rose high 
at his naive implication at what she called the rift. 
By Jove, she’d give her pearl earrings to know what 
had happened. But, after all, why should she? They 
were imitation, it was true, but why give anything 
when the fact remained that what had happened had 
brought new hope to her melting bank account. And, 
somehow, as they stood for a moment on the step of 
the apartment house in the Avenue the fantastic height 
of the building opposite did not overwhelm her new 
gust of optimism by making her feel as small as an 
ant and of as little account. On the contrary. Her 
eyes followed the perpendicular lines not from the 
top downwards but from the bottom upwards, and 
with her eyes her spirits went. It was the secret of 
New York’s inspiration, the magnetic influence of 
the rising line to lift the chin and start the growth of 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


234 

wings and give exhilaration to people dwarfed and 
engulfed in alley-ways. 

The matronly nude who looked as though she were 
carrying a jug of hot shaving water to her husband’s 
bathless room stood out plumply against the glowing 
lights of the Plaza, the model wife. 

Pelham let himself in after a panicky search in 
every pocket for an elusive latch-key. A rather strong 
but essentially hygienic aroma of floor polish, moth 
balls and ammonia assailed them in the hall. 

“ Oh,” said May. “ How nice.” 

“ Yes, now,” said Pelham with a laugh. “ You 
ought to have seen it last night. My God, the dust! 
. . . It still seems to me to perspire under the feverish 
energy of the regiment of people who’ve been working 
here all day.” 

“ I love your heads and your horsey prints and your 
man-like furniture.” She went to the middle of the 
large high sitting room, pivoted slowly round and 
chuckled. “ It looks to me like the home of a modern 
Robinson Crusoe in which no woman has ever tres¬ 
passed before. Man Friday — where is he?” She 
might as well know at once if they were the only 
inhabitants. 

“ Coming to-morrow,” said Pel, “ from an employ¬ 
ment agency. A Jap probably. Let me take your 
cloak.” 

So they were alone. Good. The unreadable books, 
the leather chairs, the model of the Galatea, the col¬ 
lection of sporting guns, the silver cups, and all those 
staring heads, — she took them in with a kodak eye. 
In every particular, from carpets to curtains, bachelor. 
What on earth had brought him back to this? 

But for all her cunning and her masterly method of 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


235 


whipping the stream Pelham refused to snap at her fly. 
His ingrained loyalty made it impossible for him to 
discuss Beatrix with anyone except Malcolm. He 
gave out, briefly, that he was in town for a few weeks 
on important business and left it at that. But that 
was enough when it was added to everything that May 
could so easily deduce from his frequent moments of 
unutterable depression. And if, in these few weeks, 
she failed to take every inch of advantage of this 
unexpected opportunity to entrench herself on Easy 
Street hers the blame. That was all. She was far 
too clever to deceive herself into the hope of being 
able to conduct this friendly reunion into a sentimental 
intrigue. This man was different from any of those 
upon whom she had practiced hitherto. The trip on 
the Galatea had made that plain. He was not young 
enough and not old enough to fall before the entice¬ 
ment of her sex. He was a one woman man, and, 
therefore, unique. And so her goal was money. She 
must get it quietly but firmly into his mind, as she 
had already started to do on the yacht, that it was for 
him to perform the benevolent work of saving her from 
earning a living in the oldest profession on earth. In 
other words, she must give him the golden opportunity 
to place himself among the philanthropists, so pleasing 
to every man, and so easy where there is no necessity 
for deprivation. 

Oh, how good, how delicious, to get even with the 
grey-blue girl! 

And then, just as she had made herself as com¬ 
fortable as it was possible on the man-sized sofa devoid 
of cushions, and Pelham had gone off on a hunt for 
the wine-cellar key, Luck smiled for the second time 
that day. 


236 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


The telephone bell rang. The instrument stood on 
a small table in the coat closet in the hall. Its beastly 
persistence brought her irritably to her feet. She sup¬ 
posed that she would have to take the message, in 
gratitude for the good bottle of green chartreuse that 
her host had promised to produce. 

“ Hullo,” she said, with the antagonism that is in¬ 
variably inspired by this instrument of so-called prog¬ 
ress. But at the sound of the clear-cut, charming 
voice that asked for Mr. Pelham Franklin her small 
hand went out spasmodically and closed the closet door. 
No wonder a gleam came into her eyes and a little 
malignant smile curled up the corners of her mouth! 

It was Beatrix speaking . . . Now for some fun! 

“ Oh, hullo, old thing,” she answered. “ This is our 
wee friend May. Pel and I have just had dinner and 
have come back to talk about you. He’s here, at my 
elbow. Shall I ask him to speak? Yes — no— 
what? . . . Hullo . . . Hullo?” 

She thought that that would do it! She thought 
that that would be followed by an utter silence and the 
dull jab of the other receiver. She could imagine the 
angry wave of color, the catch of the breath, the 
amazement. 

And when she returned to the sofa, on the tips of 
her toes, it was with dancing eyes and a glow of 
triumph. The second bout was hers. . . . The blow 
she had delivered was on the solar plexus. 

Ah! Life has the most gorgeous compensations. 


PART VII 


I 

For two mornings running the people who searched 
the advertisements on the back page of the New York 
Times for capital to invest, capital wanted, business 
connections, business loans, and business services had 
noticed, under Miscellaneous, the following message, 
which switched them, for a moment, out of thoughts 
of business and flung their imaginations into the field 
of romance. “Bluebird, — if you have not forgotten 
the man who lay in bed number 128 in the hospital at 
Armentieres during May, June and Jidy away back in 
1916 send a little feather from one of your wings 
to the Y.M.C.A. in West 57th Street. V. BY 
After these two insertions the advertisement dropped 
out, and some of the more kindly people who had read 
it, between one that called the attention of investors 
to a beautifully equipped store in the heart of the 
shopping district, and one that urged the great value 
and remarkable cheapness of a chinchilla coat which 
a young widow “ found incongruous to her new sur¬ 
roundings ”, asked themselves whether it was because 
the feather had been sent or the man who had occupied 
bed number 128 had run out of superfluous cash. 

As a matter of fact the feather had been sent, an 
actual feather, though it was not from the wing of a 
Bluebird but a resentful chicken caught for the pur¬ 
pose of supplying the answer to the appeal as it stalked 


238 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


about the little garden of a house at Mount Vernon. 
The envelope containing it was handed to his partner 
by ’Arry ’Arris at the moment when he was gazing 
proudly at the Ford limousine, just licensed as a taxi¬ 
cab, which stood in the sun on the street opposite 
to the Y.M.C.A. building under whose efficient and 
hospitable roof the two pioneers had been lodging 
for several days. 

“ They’ve found yer,” said ’Arry, holding it out. 

Beamish, who had forgotten when dressing that 
morning that taxi drivers are not in the habit of 
wearing white spats, turned upon the small cockney 
with raised eyebrows. “Found me? Who?” 

“ The Vanderbilts. This is an invitation to dinner, 
I’ll lay me shirt on it. An’ by a nice bit of fatality, 
if that’s the proper word, I’m the cove wot’ll drive you 
to the family mansion.” 

Beamish turned the envelope over and over. It was 
addressed in typewriting and for that reason lacked 
all personality, like a wax figure in a tailor’s shop. 
“ What the devil are you talking about ? ” he asked. 

’Arry laughed and waved his hand towards the 
cloudless sky. ’Oo wouldn’t be light-’eaded on a 
mornin’ like this ’ere, with the sun burnin’ out all the 
bad microbes and that little darlin’ spoilin’ to earn 
bread, butter and marmalade for a couple of ’eroes? ” 
And with a gurgle of pathetic delight and excitement 
he made a dive at the immaculate Ford and pressed a 
tender kiss upon her near side mud guard. He might 
have made a fortune on the vaudeville stage. He had 
the gift of tragic invention that never fails to win the 
instant laughter of an easy audience. On top of what 
had appeared to be a hopeless search for employment 
in England this absurd action failed to raise a laugh 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


239 


from Beamish. On the contrary, it stirred him to a 
queer emotion made up of a combination of hope¬ 
fulness and an inability to believe that luck had really 
changed, and that, at last, in a new country, he and his 
faithful bat-man were on the verge of making an 
honest living by the sweat of the brow, in the only 
way by which they were capable of doing so. It was 
almost too good to be true. He didn’t follow the 
example of his partner and kiss the car, but, impelled 
by a strong sense of superstition, he did go forward 
and lay an affectionate and grateful hand on the shin¬ 
ing instrument which was going to turn the corner 
for them, God willing. A faint and struggling re¬ 
newal of belief in the existence of a Divine power had 
come back to this man now that the disenchantment 
of war and peace were beginning to die out of his 
soul. “ Good girl, nice girl,” he said, as though 
talking to a polo pony or a gun. 

With perfect understanding of his benefactor’s 
feelings, the unexuberant interpolation of which he 
put down to Eton and Oxford, ’Arry echoed inwardly 
the dedicatory prayer that the Major’s characteristic 
simplicity had stood for, and then sprang into the 
driver’s seat, stepped on the self-starter, shouted out 
“ Watch ’er style ” and went off down the street in 
quest of his first fare. 

Whereupon Beamish opened the envelope and stood 
gazing at a short soft feather which had been dyed 
an imperfect blue in a bottle of ink. To it was tied 
a small piece of paper on which was written the words 
“ I am perched on a bough on the fourth floor of 425 
Fifth Avenue. Come round at one o’clock to-morrow 
and peck a few seeds with me. C. M.” 

To-morrow. That meant to-day! 


240 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Beamish shot out his left arm, looked at the watch 
by which he had timed so many of his flights, and so 
much waste of life, and made a bolt for the building 
which was what he called his home. Up in his bedroom 
there was something that he had bought in London 
the day before he sailed. He had made up his mind 
to give it to this girl if the case in which it rested 
became worn and shabby before he found her. And 
here she was, already. Her feather had fluttered out 
of a blue sky and fallen into his hands in spite of the 
fact that he and she might have lived for years within 
hailing distance in that crowded city and passed each 
other daily among its multitudes, almost with touching 
elbows. “What's the matter with everything?” he 
asked himself, as the elevator tried to keep pace with 
his rising spirits. “ What’s happened ? Who’s spotted 
me? Why have I suddenly become distinct enough to 
be picked out among all the ants and treated to this 
amazing favoritism? I win the Derby, I find ’Arry 
’Arris, I buy the Ford. May is as ready to get rid 
of me as I am to be free from her, and I am shown 
the way to the Bluebird’s nest almost without a search. 
Somebody’s put in a few kind words about this young 
feller, that’s certain.” 

Pocketing the smart red case, he brushed his hair, 
straightened his tie, flicked his shoes with a towel, 
caught a descending elevator, made his way into the 
street, and headed, walking on air, for the Avenue with 
twenty minutes in hand. 

He had not seen the Bluebird since the morning of 
his discharge from that hospital five years ago. He 
had never seen her out of her nurse’s uniform and only 
vaguely remembered that her name, outside the room 
with its long lines of beds and cloying smell of dis- 


J 

ANOTHER SCANDAL 241 

infectants, was Carol Magee. But from the moment 
when he opened his eyes to find himself alive and 
looked up into that young ecstatic face, and then 
growing gradually out of utter feebleness and the 
strange backwash of his interview with Death, had 
watched her swift, quiet movements in and out, hold¬ 
ing to her kindness like a lost child, looking for her 
gleam of white teeth as a shipwrecked sailor searches 
for the sight of a sail, relying upon her blessed at¬ 
tentions and cheery voice with dog-like eagerness and 
jealousy, he had invested her with a beauty and a 
goodness that put a halo round her nurse’s cap and 
had seen her through a glamor of so deep a respect 
and gratitude that whenever she came to his side pain 
and homesickness left him, and like a small boy clutch¬ 
ing a mother’s protecting hand after a nightmare he 
felt safe and confident. 

Up to the moment of that unbelievable day when 
guns had ceased to mean anything except the hideous 
reminders of an easily preventable holocaust on the 
altar of political blundering he wrote frequent brief 
and amusing letters to the Bluebird. In these he never 
said what he thought about the war because he was 
too sensitive to shock her with outbursts of blasphemy, 
nor did he ever confess that during all his flights over 
the wounded earth he had sent out to her mental Mar- 
conigrams containing all the love of his heart. There 
was our wee friend May and she happened to be able 
to call herself his wife. Answers came to his letters 
until the morning of the Armistice, when they came no 
more. But that didn’t make any difference. During 
the rest of his years in Germany and in Ireland, — 
what was the use of getting demobbed to rattle a box 
in Regent Street or draw pictures on the pavement 


242 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


round a gaping shabby cap ? — he built all about this 
girl a wonderful garden of flowering plants, he con¬ 
jured her up in all his waking hours as well as his 
dreams as the epitome of womanhood, the lodestar of 
his life. He gave her a beauty that was never hers, 
elevated her gentle firmness, her daily courage, her 
unremitting service into a nobility that she, like all her 
sister nurses, had been too much occupied and too un¬ 
self-conscious ever to worry to achieve. He made her 
something untranslatable into words, — a romance, 
an essence, a spirit, an inspiration, a guide, a purifier, 
and when at last he was able to leave his own country 
for hers he was burning with a desire to find her again, 
and, if she were free, and he could achieve freedom, 
and she could be brought to love him, and he were 
to have the luck to earn a living, — if, if, if, — to 
ask her to be his wife. 

425 Fifth Avenue, arrived at eventually through the 
mid-day outpourings of heterogeneous workers, swarm¬ 
ing like locusts in search of food, turned out to be one 
of the older buildings in that amazing street in which 
so few old buildings are permitted to remain, and its 
fourth floor was discovered to harbor the office of the 
staff, stenographers and telephone girl of an illustrated 
society journal which made its beautifully glistening 
appearance twice during all the months. 

Hesitant and breathless, his white spats gleaming, 
a thumping heart beneath his well-cut waistcoat, but 
outwardly as cool and supercilious as a greyhound, 
Beamish made his way into a large and airy room. 
The emotion of one who stands on the threshold of 
Millennium, the summit of a peak, the very end of a 
road, ran through his veins. Above the roar of 
traffic that rose to the open windows and the nerve- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


243 


rending tapping of type-machines with which the 
office was filled he seemed to hear the singing of birds. 

No one took the slightest notice of him. Not a 
single head was raised. With a sort of dogged desire 
to get through the work that they were concentrating 
upon, the girls, whether they were aware of his pres¬ 
ence or not, continued to play their instruments. And 
so there he remained, hat in hand, smooth hair brushed 
back, a curious smile under his clipped moustache, a 
malacca cane arched beneath his weight, looking more 
like the generally accepted idea of an Englishman about 
to go racing than the artist, the author or the advertiser 
whose business brought him to that floor. 

How long he would have held his stork-like attitude, 
waiting politely until someone showed signs of slack¬ 
ness, or made even the most rudimentary effort to 
recognize his existence, no one can say. He might 
have been there, apparently invisible, until the good 
hour of release if a girl had not appeared suddenly 
from a side room, dressed for the street, quietly and 
nicely dressed; a girl no longer in the first flush of 
youth, slight, even perhaps thin and a little frail and 
tired, with a worn line or two under her large eyes and 
round a very sensitive mouth. She, at any rate, was 
not busy although her quick apprehensive glance at 
the complacent clock denoted that she would have to 
be before very long. 

Beamish ventured to go towards her as she made a 
swift movement to a near-by desk, and found his voice. 

“ May I speak to Miss Carol Magee, please? ” 

“ Speaking,” she said. 

And as they looked into each others’ eyes the inces¬ 
sant cantata of city life seemed to cease as though by 
magic, and into the utter silence the long-forgotten 


244 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


sounds of groans and a banjo, a high-pitched Cockney 
voice in delirium, the tinkle of ice in a glass, the boom 
and shatter of far-off guns, came back. With the 
never-to-be-forgotten smile she held out her hand. 
“ Major Beamish! ” 

“ Bluebird,” he said. “ Bluebird! ” 

What he succeeded in wrenching out of his voice she 
caught in his eyes, — the shock of disappointment, the 
amazement, the sympathy. And she nodded and 
sighed and gave a little laugh. “ Uniform does make 
a lot of difference,” she said. 

Time and the struggle to live had taken almost all 
the colors from the plumage of the Bluebird of his 
dreams, and for that reason he instantly applied her 
remark to himself. “ I know,” he said. “ That's why 
I got into my only decent suit.” 

She thanked him with the pressure of her hand and 
looked at the clock. “ I have only an hour for lunch, 
so I think we’d better . . .” 

“ Oh, well then . . .” And he uprooted himself. 
Outside, as they stood waiting for the elevator in 
the narrow passage, he took her hand again and raised 
it to his lips. “ My dear Bluebird,” he said. 


II 

“ So that’s my story,” he w T ound up, giving her the 
history of Valentine Beamish in the peptonized man¬ 
ner of “ Who’s Who ”, since they had said goodbye on 
the doorstep of the hospital. And as they sat at a 
small table in the window of one of the innumerable 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


245 


cafeteria which grow like mushrooms in the city’s side 
streets, she studied this member of the army of “ poor 
boys ” who had once come under her care, either to 
snuff out, creep out, or join up again; one of the count¬ 
less fighting men upon whom, in the proudest days of 
her life, it had been her duty and privilege to render 
cheerfulness and the protective touch of a temporary 
mother. She would never have imagined him as the 
man who originated the nickname which had stuck till 
the end of the war. He was not a man easily forgot¬ 
ten, either, with his smooth hair and high forehead, 
Wellington nose, tooth-brush moustache, large hu¬ 
morous mouth, strong jaw line and well-set eyes in 
which there was great kindness. His height, breadth 
of shoulder, and utter lack of superfluous flesh added 
to a charming and old-fashioned courtesy gave him a 
character and a personality that generally impressed 
themselves. The flying man who had once described 
Valentine Beamish as the reincarnation of Don Quix¬ 
ote in the clothes of a Sackville Street tailor was a good 
observer. But even now, among all the pictures that 
he brought back of those once so vital days and his 
own comparatively brief entrance into them, his place 
in the mosaic of her memory was nebulous. She knew 
his name only because she had looked him up in her 
diary. It was a long time since 1916. But it hap¬ 
pened that he was the only one of her wounded boys 
whom she had met since her return to America, and her 
heart went out to him. 

“ And this is mine,” she said. “ Home to find 
myself almost prehistoric among the girls who had 
grown up since I’d been away. Nowadays a girl of 
anything over twenty is completely on the shelf and 
I had already reached that appalling age when I was 


246 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


caught in London seeing the sights in August 1914. 
I joined up then, you see, like lots of other Americans 
who thought it was our job, and so was twenty-five at 
the end of it all. Hanging about at a loose end was 
no good to me after having been a certain amount of 
use and so I went to work. That’s all.” 

Extraordinary. He had expected time to stand 
still . . . “And where's Mount Vernon?” he asked, 
so that he might continue to hear her voice. 

“ Oh, that’s where my married sister lives, — a 
suburb. I go out and spend the night there as often 
as I can. She has two of the most adorable children. 
I live in town. I used to share rooms with one of the 
girls in the office, but as she went to California a week 
ago I’ve just moved into an Allerton House with a 
suit-case. There isn’t room for anything else.” The 
old smile to which he had been wont to look forward 
so eagerly lit up her face once more. It seemed almost 
a pity that there was not always a war! 

“ Your father and mother, Bluebird. May I ask 
where they . . .” 

“ I have neither,” she said, “here. Mother died 
before I went to England and father, who was a doc¬ 
tor, went over with the Fourth Division, and was 
killed in one of the air raids on his hospital. He was 
buried in France. . . . When I hear people say that 
the war is old stuff . . Her voice broke. 

“ Oh, I’m sorry,” said Beamish. Unmarried, alone, 
working, going out as often as she could get away to 
see her sister’s two adorable children. . . . He meant 
nothing to her. She had almost forgotten him. But 
as he looked into the face that he had glorified and 
crossed all those miles of waters to find, he came out 
of his long dream into a far better reality, because here 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


247 


was not a spirit, an essence, but a woman who bore 
some of the many wounds of life with the courage 
and uncomplaining of the fighting man, to whom she 
had devoted those five years of her youth. If he had 
the luck to win his way into her respect and love, it 
should be his privilege to tend her as she had tended 
him so that she should see that there was one man who 
didn’t think that the war was old stuff and who had 
gratitude. For another and warmer reason, too. The 
disappointment that had swept over him at his first 
sight of her, the amazement and the sympathy, all 
natural enough in the circumstances, had been already 
replaced by admiration of her brave and uncomplain¬ 
ing acceptance of things, and the fine soul that put a 
light in her eyes and gave beauty to her face. The 
almost spiritual love with which he had surrounded 
her on the little altar of his dreams, became human 
during this meeting and led his thoughts to a little 
house in some such place as Mount Vernon, in which, 
some day, there might be two other adorable children. 
And before they left that crowded eating place for the 
street and the office one of his many “ ifs ” had 
disappeared. She, at any rate, was free. 

They went out as they had gone in among a small 
army of girls, — little girls for the most part, nearly 
all of whom wore the regulation uniform of the flap¬ 
per, — a basin hat stuck on the side of an over-curled 
bobbed head, a thin sweater of Chauve Souris color 
and design, astonishingly Baedeker-like as a guide to 
form, a short tweed frock with a fringe which might 
have been made by a bevy of playful puppies, woolen 
stockings with the patterns of sugar sticks, flabby 
and generally uncleaned shoes with rubber soles and 
no heels. Many of them had pretty faces, but all had 


248 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


plastered themselves with as much cheap make-up as is 
used by the anxious harlots on the London streets, — 
nice, honest, eager, hard-working little people, all of 
them, who brought to their desks, in many cases, a 
disconcerting illiteracy, but quick wits and great 
shrewdness which compensated to some extent for an 
utter lack of manners and an unconscious misuse of 
English which had become an argot. 

“ Do you go out every day at one o’clock?” he 
asked, delivering her back to the old building in the 
Avenue. 

“ Except Saturdays and holidays, yes.” 

“ Then, unless you have any objection to a perfectly 
selfish scheme, you’ll find me waiting in the hall for 
you as often as I can manage it and we’ll sample the 
food at every restaurant within walking distance.” 

“ I’d love to ,” she said. How lonely this man must 
be! 

“ To-morrow then.” 

“ All right. To-morrow then.” 

He slipped into her hand the leather case that he 
had bought for her and which contained a charming 
little wrist watch. “ You’ll know that I am waiting 
down here by this,” he said. 

And when the jammed-tight elevator, worked by a 
young colored man with eyes that made one think of 
two bubbles in a cup of chocolate, had taken the Blue¬ 
bird back to her typewriter, with a new and delightful 
interest in life, Beamish edged his way into the equally 
jammed-tight street. 

“ Poor little Bluebird,” he said to himself. “ How 
well she deserves a nest and how hard I’ll work to give 
her one.” 

At six o’clock that night when ’Arry ’Arris came 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 249 

back from his first adventure, wearing the grin of an 
accidental terrier after the discovery of an unexpected 
bone, Beamish was pacing up and down his street with 
his hands behind his back and his face turned up to 
the cloudless sky. 

“ Any luck? ” he asked eagerly. 

“ Marvellious,” replied ’Arry, nipping out of the 
Ford. “ Twelve dollars and fifty-five cents.” 

“ No!” 

“ Swelp me Bob, partner,” and he handed it over to 
the head of the firm. “ But, oh, God! ” 

“What?” 

“To get along these streets without being cracked 
like a nut or smashing into something and getting spilt 
like a bean you ’ave to be a Douglas Fairbanks, T 11 tell 
yer that! What with trucks and tram-cars, ’orse drays 
and pillars, pros and rank amertoors it’s a miracle to 
get through. And then the cops! One word about 
these ’ere. If it ever comes to the point of ’aving to 
open yer mouth, talk with an Irish accent or you’re 
as good as dead.” 

“ Right,” said Beamish, getting in. “ Go and have 
dinner and put in a good evenin’. You won’t see any¬ 
thing of me until I’ve beaten your record by forty-five 
cents, old man. So long.” And off he went, without 
giving the glistening Ford time even to say its prayers. 


Ill 

It was with a small thrill of excitement that, cross¬ 
ing Broadway to go through Fifty-seventh Street to 


250 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


the Grand Central there to hang about for a fare. 
Beamish saw the hiring hand of a man standing on 
the wide corner, an instantly likeable man, tall, broad 
shouldered, dressed in obviously English clothes, wear¬ 
ing large horn-rimmed glasses, and a very worried 
expression on his nice ugly face. A girl was with him, 
the first sight of whom drew from Beamish the one 
word angel. 

Obeying the signal to draw up on the opposite side 
with the Ford’s blunt nose directed towards the 
Avenue, Beamish waited while his first customers 
negotiated the crossing. “ Luck,” he said to himself 
exultantly, “ is with me. Em the little friend of all 
the world,” and tilted his dump hat at an even more 
rakish angle. 

“ You know those garage people,” Malcolm went on, 
opening the door. “ When they say an hour they mean 
two. But that doesn’t matter. We’ve got to talk and 
I’ll have dinner sent up to my rooms.” 

“ It does matter,” said Beatrix. “ There’s baby. I 
shan’t be able to go in to say ‘ good-night ’ to him and 
I dare not imagine what he’ll think of me for cutting 
that ceremony. However, under the circumstances, 
he’s a fortunate boy to have a mother. It was a very 
near go, Mally.” And she got in. 

“ Forty-four West Forty-fourth Street,” said Mal¬ 
colm and followed her. 

It had been, indeed, a very near go. An urgent 
telephone call from Malcolm had brought Beatrix to 
town in her car. There was the vital need of a con¬ 
sultation about Pelham and his hard and fast deter¬ 
mination to accept failure and cut the knot. Meeting 
Malcolm at his club at half-past five it had been 
decided that^he should drive back to the country with 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


251 


her and talk the whole thing over on the way, then 
dine and return to town by the last train. It was nec¬ 
essary for Beatrix to order something in Forty-second 
Street and so they had driven up Sixth Avenue. A 
motor truck had swooped out of a side street and with 
the lawless intention of crossing at all costs had col¬ 
lided with the car before it could jam on its brakes, 
smashed a hole in the chassis and showered its occu¬ 
pants with broken glass and splinters. By the grace of 
God Beatrix and Malcolm were unhurt and the bat¬ 
tered car had been taken to the nearest garage for 
temporary patching under the blasphemous supervision 
of the chauffeur, whose latent dislike of trucks had 
now dropped into an active and lifelong hatred. Who 
can wonder? 

“How do you feel now, Bee dear?” Poor old 
Mally. The tone was in every sense of the word par¬ 
ental, but there was nothing remotely parental in the 
desire to take the escaped girl in his arms and hold her 
to a heart that was consumed with love. 

Beatrix was sitting with her hands clasped, a grave 
and rather awed expression, with her eyes first on one 
side of the street and then on the other with a curious 
intensity and interest. 

“ I don’t quite know, old boy,” she said, starting to 
work it out. “ Astonished, mostly. It doesn’t seem 
believable that we’re not dead, — not in the place that 
people have killed each other about ever since there 
were priests. I’m glad we’re not because it’s so 
ugly. . . . When that truck bore down upon us like 
a liner out of the fog I said to myself, ‘ Then this is 
death’, and I threw my spirit into the nursery and then 
all the way back to Pel because it was my last chance 
to say I love you, I love you. Then the crash, the 


252 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


pause, the anticipation of physical pain that never 
came, the sensation of the spirit coming back into my 
body, — I was so certain that I was going to be killed 
that I had died in imagination. And now here we are, 
driving to your rooms, just as alive as we were before, 
and in exactly the same ghastly mess. Have you 
noticed the angle of our driver’s hat? ” 

This mixture of seriousness and flippancy was noth¬ 
ing new to Malcolm. It had been this girl’s method of 
protecting her emotion ever since the days when he 
had taught her to skate. It was easy to see, how¬ 
ever, that she had been through an experience that 
would recur again and again in her dreams, that her 
whole system had been shaken as by an earthquake. 
A good deal to his surprise, because Beatrix com¬ 
pelled his adoration, Malcolm was sympathetic but not 
sorry, and this he intended to tell her at the earliest 
opportunity. 

More by the judgment of the white-spatted taxi- 
man than luck, they arrived at the bachelor apartment 
house without another accident, but not without 
another, although a slighter, shock. Beamish, lament¬ 
ably unaware that manners and courtesy are not in¬ 
cluded in the license of a cab-driver, was out, open 
door in hand, before Malcolm could make a move. 
Looking like a modern Sir Galahad in his most inap¬ 
propriate clothes he assisted his patrons to the pave¬ 
ment with a deference so graceful and patrician that 
it took their breath away and filled Malcolm with a 
sense of shyness which made all question of haggling 
an offense. And so, dreadfully uncomfortable and 
apologetic, he ventured to tender a five dollar bill and 
having swung himself up to that, bolted after the won¬ 
dering Beatrix and hoped that the episode was ended. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


253 


It wasn’t, because Beamish, failing to grasp the black¬ 
mailing asset of his disconcerting knightliness, fol¬ 
lowed him into the building. “ I beg your pardon, 
Sir,” he said. “ You forgot to wait for change,” and 
this he handed over to the goose-fleshed Malcolm from 
the spoils of ’Arry ’Arris. After which an Embassy 
bow, a friendly smile and a perfectly cool retreat. 

The inscrutable parrot gave Beatrix the sort of 
ironical and Billingsgate welcome that the Prime Min¬ 
ister of England receives from the Labor benches 
when he rises to address the House. He was, in fact, 
so objectionable that Malcolm, strangling a strong 
desire to give the ancient offender to the elevator boy, 
removed the cage to the very limit of his rooms and 
shut both intervening doors. He returned to find 
Beatrix standing rather limply in front of a photo¬ 
graph of Pelham, an enlargement of a very happy 
snapshot which had caught him, hatless, sun-tanned 
and as fit as a fiddle, at the end of a drive, a sprawling 
shadow behind him on the close cropped tee and a 
perfectly detailed background of the undulating course 
over which he had played with her so often in what 
Malcolm was already thinking of as the good old 
days. . . . Damned shame! 

And having studied the picture over her shoulder 
for a few minutes, he began self-consciously to say the 
things that were running through his mind. “ Can 
you imagine that man, born to be in the open with a 
club or a gun, messing about a city in weather like 
this, lunching, dining and doing theatres with a cun¬ 
ning little woman who has caught him at a loose end 
and has grabbed at the chance to fasten on him like a 
mosquito? ” 

“ No,” said Beatrix, “ I simply can’t.” 


■254 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ Well, that’s what you’ve brought about, my dear, 
and that’s what I called you into Town to discuss. 
Sit here and I’ll put this cushion behind you. The 
poor old sofa’s seen its best days and if you don’t know 
its tricks you may be very uncomfortable on a broken 
spring.” 

But Beatrix ignored the sofa and selected an upright 
chair with arms. “ Why pretend that you want me 
to be comfortable?” she said. “You don’t like me 
and you’re all on the side of Pel,” and she sat down, 
having achieved the purpose of every woman who 
knows that she is completely in the wrong of making 
the man who is about to do his best to put her right 
feel like a worm. 

Malcolm deliberately sat on the spring. What an 
extraordinary thing it is that the man who is most 
generous with the blessings of friendship should be 
required invariably to pay twice for his gift. 

“ Then too,” she went on, letting him see that she 
hated the chair, “ why bring me to Town to talk about 
May Beamish? I’ve known all that for three days.” 

With that one calm statement she undermined all 
the horrible importance of the information that Mal¬ 
colm had conceived it his duty to impart. “ How? ” 
he asked, in amazement, perfectly certain that she had 
not descended to such depths of disloyalty as to have 
had Pelham watched. 

“ The night I rang him up at his rooms to ask him 
to come back and to tell him that I never meant to 
hurt him so much she answered the telephone and 
threw down the gauntlet.” 

“ And on the . . . the top of that you . . . you let 
her go on? ” 

“You don’t know Pelham as well as I do, Mally,” 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 255 

she said, making him realize that so far as that went 
she, and not he, was all on the side of Pel. 

If he had not been so desperately eager, so deeply 
and sincerely anxious to mend this broken thread, 
holding marriage, and especially this particular mar¬ 
riage, to be the most beautiful and the most essential 
of all human relationships, to preserve and protect 
which every mortal effort should be strained, he would 
have cried out, “ Shoot, I give it up ”, and retired. But 
he adored Beatrix and Pelham was his only pal. To 
bring them together again was now the one object of 
his life, little as either of them seemed to deserve it. 
He rose in his wrath and let go. 

“ You may know Pel better than I do,” he said, 
standing over her in great indignation, but with his 
tie a little crooked and his hair in a comic feather — 
he was one of those men who never considered it nec¬ 
essary to brush the back of his head — “ Pm not going 
to argue about that, but you don’t know very much 
about man. You proved that on the great day by put¬ 
ting Pel to such a frightful test and you’ve proved it 
since by leaving him in the hands of this woman. 
Under any other conditions you could afford, perfectly 
well, to sit tight and carry on, at peace with the world. 
But under the conditions that you deliberately worked 
up Pel, like every other one of us, being starved and 
humiliated and not giving a single curse, chucks him¬ 
self away with all the fine things that he ever held to 
and stood for. He cuts off his nose to spite his face. 
He degrades himself for the ghastly pleasure of being 
revenged on life. It’s the natural reaction and to my 
way of thinking he couldn’t revenge himself better 
than with a woman eager to retrieve her former failure 
to catch him on the hop. If you wanted to bring about 


256 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


another scandal, if for some uncanny reason you had 
made up your mind to break up your home and lay in 
utter ruins one of the few marriages which had every¬ 
thing to make it succeed, then, of course, you’ve gone 
the right way to work. But if you’ve been fooling, if 
all this is really the outcome of a temperamental spree, 
as you make me believe that it was, then all I can say 
is that you’ve let it carry you into a disaster that may 
never be wiped out. When you heard that woman’s 
voice on Pel’s ’phone, in justice to all your best memo¬ 
ries of his love and the result of it which makes you so 
proud, you should have dashed to the rescue and 
humbled yourself. You owed it to God and the angels. 
As it is . . He flung up his hands and went over 
to the window, at the end of his burst. 

What was the use? He had delivered himself of a 
tirade that was probably as ridiculous as all his others 
to this ancient girl, this product of a spoiling system, 
this representative of modern feminine youth that 
jeered at experience, had no respect for age, no 
patience with tradition, no sympathy for all the old 
stuff of a former generation and who went through 
life with a selfishness and an individualism that left 
friends and parents angry, frightened and stultified. 

“ As it is,” said Beatrix, joining him at the window 
and putting her hand on his arm, “ although I agree 
with you that I have behaved like a fool and ought to 
be whipped for indulging in a temperamental kink that 
I can never make anyone understand, I am more cer¬ 
tain than ever that Pel loves me and therefore I have 
absolute faith in his loyalty. I may know very little 
about man but I know everything about my man. He 
loves me, he loves me, he left me because he loves me, 
he’s staying away now because he loves me and he’s 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


257 


only going about with our wee friend May because he’s 
so lonely and misses me so frightfully. You don't think 
much of me, dear old Mally, and you have very good 
reasons for your opinion. I know that, perfectly well. 
But all this had to happen, it simply had to. It’s a 
part of the illness that girls go through and I can no 
more explain it to you than I can fly over the moon. 
All I can now ask you to do is to take my word for it 
that I’ve recovered, that I'm most awfully sorry and 
that I’m going most humbly to ask Pel to forgive me 
and come back. There is only one thing that I want 
to do with all the rest of my life and that is to be a 
good wife to Pel and a good mother to his baby — a 
good woman for ever more.” 

All this was said so quietly, but with so deep an 
underlying emotion of ecstasy, by one whose voice, 
attitude and very appearance not only showed recovery 
but growth, understanding and a glorious faith, that 
it carried the poor old worried poet into a most un- 
Fraserly deed. It made him seize that young slim 
form in his arms and imitate the far too affectionate 
method of the bear. It made him give a whoop of 
hopefulness and joy, and ignore the fact that a well 
balanced hat hates nothing so much as to be disturbed. 
It was a good thing that the parrot, with his appalling 
vocabularv, was not a witness to the scene. 

“ And now,” said Beatrix, rectifying the damage 
without the assistance of a glass, — there was no such 
useful thing among the nice conglomeration of Mal¬ 
colm’s possessions, — “ take me to see Pel. Give me 
ten minutes with him to show what I’ve become, and 
we’ll all drive home together.” 


258 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 



The dark clouds which had been moving slowly and 
sullenly towards New York during the last hour had, 
by this time, blotted out the blue sky and the generous 
sun, and as Beatrix and Malcolm appeared on the 
steps of the building from which the parrot observed 
life from the fifth floor windows, broke. Down came 
such sheets of torrential rain that almost in an instant 
streams began to pour along the gutters and the 
appearance of the city was changed in a flash. Straw 
hatted men minus waistcoats and women in light sum¬ 
mer clothes disappeared as though by magic to herd 
under friendly awnings and crowd together in door¬ 
ways. In one dramatic moment the pavements of 
Fifth Avenue were as empty as they only are in the 
early hours of the morning and its ever-moving 
crowds, driven into individualism by the heavy whip 
of self-protection and the urgent need of earning a 
livelihood, were surprised into becoming spectators of 
a burst of egotism on the part of a force greater than 
themselves, called to a sudden halt in their day’s rush 
by a temperamental outpouring over which none of the 
latest inventions of their enterprising country had the 
slightest control. One could feel the resentment and 
impatience of all these people, brought to a halt in 
their desire to keep dry and unspoilt, at this deliberate 
interference with their movements, this autocratic 
power which held them in a wrathful staticism if only 
for ten minutes. Those who were unable to bear the 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


259 


restraint rushed into empty taxis and were carried in 
triumph to a probably unnecessary destination. 
Others, victims to the habit of keep moving, dodged 
ignominiously from cover to cover. The rest, fuming 
and frettting at what was, in reality, a great refresh¬ 
ment to an overheated city, stayed where they had 
placed themselves and watched the rain toe-dance along 
the street and bounce up from the roofs of the pro¬ 
cession of cars. 

Malcolm hailed a cab which had set down a cus¬ 
tomer at the hotel opposite to his building. It reeked 
with the noisome aroma of a cheap cigar, but it was 
better than no cab at all and infinitely better than 
killing valuable time on a doorstep until one that was 
spruce and hygienic happened to pass. Before they had 
been locked and unlocked often enough to achieve a 
sight of the Plaza the rain had ceased as abruptly as 
it had begun, and the Avenue had resumed its normal 
condition as though the controlling hand of nature’s 
policeman had fallen to his side. 

If Malcolm had been a superstitious man and Bea¬ 
trix had not been so confident of her gift to mend, they 
might both have been a little anxious because no blue 
had come back into the sky. 

It was half past six. It was pretty certain, therefore, 
that Pelham would be in his rooms. The uniformed 
man in the hall, easily mistaken for the Commodore of 
a yacht club, touched his peaked cap to Malcolm and 
nodded the statement, without going to the unneces¬ 
sary trouble of putting it into words, that “ our 
mutual friend has been in some time. Go right up, 
Sonny.” A brotherly person. 

The elderly elevator man, trying as usual to disguise 
the fact that his job required less intelligence than any 


260 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


that could be devised beneath the earnest concentration 
of one performing a great mechanical feat, took them 
right up and let them out with a deprecatory smile as 
who should say, “ Yes, I know, but practice makes 
perfect even in this line of work, which breaks the 
nerve of all but superman. You’re welcome.” 

Beatrix rang the bell and gave Malcolm an encour¬ 
aging smile. The door was opened briskly by a Jap 
whose beautiful bed-side smile turned into an expres¬ 
sion of indignant surprise as these, to him, utter 
strangers passed with the proprietory air of prohibi¬ 
tion agents to whom no place is sacred. Pelham’s hat 
and stick were on the hall table and the homely aroma 
of pipe tobacco hung in the air. Breathing this in with 
a sort of emotion Beatrix touched the hat with loving 
fingers and led the way eagerly into the sitting room. 
Not one of the glassy eyes of all those heads warned 
her of the shock that she was to receive. Not one. 

Sitting at Pelham’s desk, with the brazen confidence 
of a mistress, wearing an evening frock in which she 
looked far more attractive and charming than any 
woman, neither wife nor sister, has the right to look 
in a bachelor’s rooms, was our wee friend May. She 
had just finished addressing an envelope, — a Pelham 
envelope, — and was in the act of placing the sticky 
part to the tip of a small but vastly capable tongue 
when she heard the unexpected approach of intruders, 
looked up and saw — Good Lord, the grey-blue girl 
and the man who didn’t like her and made no bones 
about it! What the . . . 

Beatrix buckled as the hot needle of jealousy with 
its long nasty thread went clean through her heart. 
The sight of this extraordinarily pretty person so 
blatantly in possession seemed to substantiate Mai- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


261 


colm’s point about man. But only for one bad 
moment. Her absolute belief in Pelham’s love and 
loyalty swept this feeling away like a tidal wave. It 
was part of May’s gold-digging scheme to take advan¬ 
tage of this muddle of misunderstanding, and the way 
to face the situation was to treat her presence lightly 
and as a perfectly natural thing. And so she said, 
making a quick recovery, “ Oh, how very nice to find 
you here,” with her best hostess smile, and as though 
she had gone out for an hour and returned to greet a 
welcome visitor who had dropped in for a cup of tea. 

It was done with such supreme imperturbability and 
everyday coolness that Malcolm, who had on many 
previous occasions laid all his hats at her feet, show¬ 
ered round her, metaphorically, every page of manu¬ 
script upon which he had, in an agony of brain-birth, 
tried to write something of which she might be proud. 
He had caught the catch of her breath at the sight of 
this much too sweetly pretty little bundle of tricks. 
He had received her sweep of anger at the insufferable 
cheek of this usurpation of Pelham’s desk, if you 
please, perhaps the most intimate of personal things. 
Hasn’t it been said, over and over again, that he loved 
her to the end of loving? 

May, too, paid an inward compliment to this per¬ 
fect piece of savoir faire. “ Well played,” she said to 
herself, “ oh, very well played,” catching the ball with 
a back-hand stroke and cutting it over the net. The 
grey-blue girl was devilish clever but could she compete 
in this game? 

“ I saw you driving early this afternoon, and rather 
hoped you might drop in. Yes, this is particularly 
nice, especially as you have brought our dear old Mally. 
A family party, isn’t it? ” 


262 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Not because of the insincere familiarity towards 
himself, which, of course, he didn’t miss, — she 
loathed him, he knew, — but wholly because of the 
nasty innuendo in which she had wrapped her cunning- 
answer, Malcolm turned hot and cold. Elizabeth 
McKenzie had foisted a queer collection of wastrels 
on her friends in New York, from singing Russians 
who slobbered over women’s hands, to dud English¬ 
men who had been permitted, with great unnational 
wisdom, to secure passports; but by having brought 
Mrs. Valentine Beamish into the Franklin circle she 
had gone to the limit of her carelessness. And more 
than ever it seemed to Malcolm that Pelham had let 
himself down in the general respect by having any¬ 
thing to do with such a woman, notwithstanding the 
mental attitude into which he had been flung, and he 
held his breath while Beatrix gathered herself together 
for a kill. For very much less than this he had often 
seen her apply her verbal steel. 

But Beatrix had arranged a method of fighting wee 
May, and that was not to allow her the satisfaction of 
being regarded as an opponent at all, but as a rather 
comic and harmless person who was making an abor¬ 
tive struggle to worm her way into the good graces of 
a man immune from her feminine wiles. And so, 
with only the flick of an eyelash, she held May’s eyes 
and laughed. “ What a funny little soul you are,” she 
said. “ Have you always had the capacity to act the 
leading parts in the plots of your imagination? If 
this is the scene of your latest play may I suggest that 
you open another window? It’s a little stuffy here.” 

It was a well-judged hit. An abnormally developed 
sense of humor had never succeeded in getting rid of 
May’s immense dislike of ridicule. She had had so 



ANOTHER SCANDAL 


263 


much of it from her brothers. But she covered an 
inward squirm with a quick assumption of fussy 
domesticity and another broad stroke of suggestive¬ 
ness. “ I’m sorry,” she said, “ I told our temporary 
Jap to close the windows while the storm was on, but 
he doesn’t believe in fresh air and I have to round him 
up like a sheep-dog. Please, Mally,” and she illus¬ 
trated her desire with a sketchy gesture. 

This reiterated indication of proprietorship, this 
laboured attempt to plant the impression of belonging 
to Pelham's apartment was outrageous and disgusting, 
but stupidly overdone. It even seemed to Beatrix,, 
knowing Pel, to be pathetic, because in a series of 
flashes she could see so plainly the failure of this pur¬ 
ring little person to mean anything more in these 
bachelor rooms than one of its heads, and not half as 
much as the model of the Galatea. In his loneliness 
Pelham had cried out, “ Horse, horse, play with me,” 
and she had come trotting up. That was all. All the 
same it was obviously necessary to get her out before 
Pelham made his appearance, and how was that to be 
worked? Beatrix was too proud to show her eager¬ 
ness to see him by going into his bedroom, where he 
was apparently changing for dinner, and if the truth 
must be told, too shy. 

Still without any details as to the rift because 
Pelham had edged away from all her questions, May 
guessed that Beatrix had come now to make up the 
quarrel and conduct her husband back to the cottage 
in triumph. That he adored the grey-blue girl and 
pined for a sight of his boy had never been made more 
certain than that afternoon when she had found him 
sitting in an attitude of the most frightful despond¬ 
ency, with homesickness stamped upon his face, and 


264 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


had rashly tried to fire him with a carnal spark, and 
seen him freeze. But for him to be removed from his 
rooms at this time would mean the ruination of what 
she called her brilliant scheme for the insurance of a 
soft future, and therefore, somehow or other, Beatrix 
must be “ shocked out, quick.” 

It would have been very much more exciting to 
Malcolm, — but that he hated excitement, — if he had 
understood that Beatrix and the Beamish were meas¬ 
uring wits to achieve the same result. He didn’t even 
wait for the verbal match. He was far too anxious. 
He murmured an excuse and left the room to go and 
talk to Pel. 

And this brought a glint of anger into May’s wide 
blue eyes because she regarded it as an unsporting 
trick. 

There was silence in that long high room for a 
moment, — that hated room in which Pelham had 
paced up and down until the small hours of every 
morning cursing his age and his blundering and the 
disaster brought about by them both, telling himself 
that in spite of all Malcolm’s urgings he was right in 
his decision to let Beatrix out of the mistake that she 
had made, though he longed for her and the boy with 
such an agony of longing that he could hardly bear to 
live. And during this silence, which was all broken 
by the incessant clamor of the street, Beatrix made 
a sudden decision not to finesse with the woman who 
pretended to be in possession, but, as time meant 
everything, to bring the whole thing to an abrupt 
point in icy Anglo-Saxon. 

And so she went over to the sofa and looking 
squarely at our wee friend May, with her yards of 
open-work stockings, said “ Look here, I know your 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


265 


game and the fact that you’re here this evening is a 
pretty certain proof that you haven’t pulled it off. 
You never will and you’re simply wasting time.” 

“ You think so? ” 

“ I know it. Now, Mrs. Beamish, I want if pos¬ 
sible to avoid a scene. I want to have this place to 
myself without calling in the Jap to put you out. Will 
you do me the favor to get up and go, or must I ring 
the bell and give orders for you to be conducted to the 
elevator by a man who is probably an excellent 
exponent of jiu-jitsu? ” 

May laughed, a really most musical ripple. “ A 
primeval person under your stucco, it seems,” she said, 
settling into the sofa like a hen in warm earth. 

“ That’s true,” said Beatrix, “ so I think you’ll be 
wise to let this little episode end with dignity.” 

“ You amuse me,” said May. 

“ Then we’ll both be amused. That’s fair,” and 
discovering the bell Beatrix went for it quietly, but 
with the autocracy of all her early training surging in 
her blood, and pressed it hard. 

May sprang to her feet. “If you dare ...” 

And stopped because, followed by Malcolm, Pelham 
marched quickly into the room and clapped a sort of 
gag into her mouth by what she described to herself 
as a brother-in-law expression. 

Going straight to Beatrix with outstretched hand 
and a smile that was half-affectionate and half-jocular 
he said, “ Hullo, how are you? What are you doing 
in town? ” and he threw the word “ taxi ” to the oily 
little man who had answered the bell. 

Then, without waiting for an answer from the girl 
whose breath had been completely taken away, he went 
on in the same brisk, familiar tone. “ Awful sorry 


266 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


to hear about the collision. Tricky business getting 
about the streets these days. I'm dining with May 
and as we’re going on to a show that begins rather 
early I’m afraid we shall have to make a dash for it, 
but if you’d care to wait here while Malcolm tele¬ 
phones to the garage for your car, do, by all means.” 

He picked up May’s cloak, put it round her and gave 
the wordless and stupefied Beatrix, to whom he seemed 
to be an unrecognizable person, another and an even 
more perfect brother-in-law smile. “ I don’t want to 
hurry you, May,” he added, and going to the door 
clapped Malcolm on the back. 

It was one of the exquisite moments of May’s 
checkered career. Chucked out, eh? Taken by the 
elbow by a black-haired expert and flung into an ele¬ 
vator, eh? Ye gods, it was gorgeous! Her chuckle 
was malignant and triumphant enough to bring a 
flicker into the glassy eyes of all those heads. “ Well, 
so long,” she said, waving her hand. “ Hope you’ll 
have no skids on the way home. Righto, Pel, I’m with 
you,” and away they went together, seeing life like a 
second lieutenant from a Texas camp and a girl from 
a one-eyed town. 

And when the bang of the door echoed through 
those rooms like a sort of parting shot Malcolm turned 
to Beatrix. “ It can’t be mended,” he said, “ it can’t.” 

But if he expected to see a broken girl beaten to her 
knees he was hopelessly disappointed. He saw a pale 
girl, certainly, a girl who might have been through 
another near go in her car, but one who was without 
fear or the faint suggestion of cowardice. “ I deserved 
that smack in the face because it’s all my fault,” she 
said. “ But it can be mended and it shall be mended. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 267 

It shall! . . . Ring up the garage, Mally dear. I must 
go home at once to his boy.” 


V 

At twelve o’clock the following morning, — blue 
sky, friendly sun, air purged of all humidity by yes¬ 
terday’s storm — the wren-like Mrs. Beamish was 
deposited at the new entrance of the Plaza by Eliza¬ 
beth McKenzie’s patient and hard-working car. 
Charmingly and simply dressed, looking too young and 
pretty and soft to be out alone in a sinister world, 
there was all about her a new energy which made her 
heels rap, a new purpose, a new blaze of ambition. 
Crossing the wide pavement to the short flight of 
stone steps she ran up to the open door and went in 
to the nice foyer of the hotel which gives dignity and 
beauty to that corner of New York upon which some 
artistic hand has laid a European touch. 

She was, of course, late for the appointment that 
she had made over the telephone some hours earlier 
with the man whose name she bore. Not very late. 
Twenty minutes perhaps, which didn’t seem to her to 
be late at all. In the old days, those very old days 
before the war, she had been known to keep that 
patient man kicking his heels for very much longer 
than that. Why be a woman, and a pretty woman, 
and a wife? 

The fact that Valentine Beamish did not rise slowly, 
like a long-legged bird, from one of the damask chairs 
was no proof that he had not arrived. It meant simply 


268 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


that he had strolled off to the book stall, to kill time 
by looking at the bright covers of a hundred maga¬ 
zines, or gaze, with probable pity, at the large collection 
of novels which stood in eager competition waiting for 
a friendly hand. There are few sights more pathetic to 
anyone with sympathy than a jumble of brain children 
vying with each other, mostly vainly, to be bought and 
taken home. Except, perhaps, the lost dogs in their 
little cages, leaping at their wires at the sound of 
approaching steps. 

And so, in full confidence, May left the not yet 
crowded foyer and plunged into the maze which might 
just as easily lead her into the fly-catcher parlor of 
a firm of Stock Exchange spiders, a dressmaker’s shop 
already displaying autumn frocks and winter furs, — 
as though time didn’t move fast enough without being 
pushed, — or a staircase leading into the bowels of the 
building, as to the old foyer where isolated girls with 
septuagenarian eyes and dead white noses were waiting 
to be fed by any courageous passer-by. And there, 
with his whimsical smile, stood the ex-flying man, 
patiently, in spats. 

He said, “ Good morning. How well you look,” 
with that rigid lack of enthusiasm which goes with 
British courtesy. 

But she was too deeply concentrated upon the pur¬ 
pose of that meeting to go off on a greeting tangent. 
“ Find a quiet corner where we can sit and talk,” she 
said. “ I’ve got important things to say.” 

“ Why shouldn’t we kill two birds with one stone 
and talk while we have lunch? ” 

“ No. I’ve only just had breakfast.” 

“ Oh, well then, let’s explore. I don’t know the 
geography of this excellent pub but it ought to be easy 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


269 


to find a quiet perch.” And he led the way with long 
slow strides and finding, immediately, the place where 
people crowd for tea and try to talk above the band, 
waved his hand towards its range of emptiness with a 
Columbus smile, wondering what on earth was to be 
sprung upon him now. Remarkable little person, this 
May, who, if his former knowledge of her character 
held true, did not require his presence for any but a 
purely selfish reason. He hoped against hope that she 
was not about to suggest the outward continuance of 
their matrimonial adventure. 

Spotting a place beneath the leafy screen behind 
which the orchestra had not yet collected to twist the 
nerves with jazz, May went for it energetically, sat, 
took a cigarette from her watered silk case upon which 
was stamped the Beamish crest, and was smoking with 
evident relish before her husband had followed her up. 
That impatient method of anticipating his services had 
always formed one of his grievances. 

“ Now,” she said, coming to business with the alac¬ 
rity of a man who is about to do his friend the favor 
of letting him in on the ground floor of a rotten con¬ 
cern, “ when we dined together the other night we 
skirted the question of how we are going to tackle the 
future, didn’t we? ” 

“ We did,” said Beamish. “ The past and the pres¬ 
ent, under the circumstances, appeared naturally to be 
as far as we could go then, I thought.” 

“ Always the little gentleman,” said May, with a 
flash of teeth. “ I don’t know how it is with you, but 
with me, since then, things have begun to shape them¬ 
selves, so let’s waive the Grandison manner and come 
down to cases. Does that suit you f ” 


270 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ Perfectly.” Good God, what had she elaborated 
in the back of that dynamic mind? 

“ You resented my first idea that you had come over 
to live on me, for which I apologized, and I took it 
from that that you would be prepared to do the decent 
thing and let me out if I asked you to do so.” 

“ Of course,” he said, with the most intense relief. 

“ You won’t want me to explain why, I know, — 
you hate personalities, don’t you ? — and as I don’t 
want to mention names, or go into any details, I'll 
merely tell you this. The chance has come for me, if 
I work it right, to get married to a man who has all 
the money I need to allow me to indulge in my pet 
hobbies for the first time in my life.” 

“ Congratulations,” said Beamish. 

“ Thanks, but they’re a little previous because I’ve 
all the way to go. And, moreover, I shall never be 
able to get there at all unless you will fall in with my 
plan of action.” 

“ Command me,” he said, fully aware of the fact 
that she was taking so long to come to her point 
because it was required of him to do something that 
must go against the grain. 

She lit another cigarette, and being one who smoked 
from a sense of need and not to achieve a rakish air, 
inhaled deeply. Then she leaned a little forward and 
laid her small hand on his knee; and then, of course, 
it came. 

“ It won’t do for me to divorce you, Val,” she said, 
“ in the way it’s generally done.” 

“ I’m afraid I don’t understand. That’s the only 
way.” 

Damn! The man’s feet were stuck deep in the old 
traditions, despite the war which had blown them 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


271 


nearly all sky high. “ There isn’t an only way,” she 
whipped in. “ There are two ways to everything, and 
I’m obliged to take the other one. That is, I want to 
be divorced.” 

“ It couldn’t be done,” he said. 

Wonderful! For the quality of resisting any change 
of form commend her to Valentine Beamish. There¬ 
fore she must be patient and wriggle in through a chink 
in his armor. “ I’m in a very difficult and delicate 
position, if the truth must be told,” she said, leading 
up to a lie. “ You may find it difficult to believe but 
I’m in love, madly in love. The man, very much like 
you, dear Val, is married, and also like you insists on 
being divorced. He wants, of course, to achieve that 
end by going through the whole nasty business in the 
cold-blooded manner that is demanded under the law. 
But that’s where I come in. I refuse to allow him to 
besmirch himself by any such humiliating and degrad¬ 
ing method. The only way out, then, is to do the thing 
honestly, with me as the eventual co-respondent, — for 
us to be ‘ caught ’ together. Do you see? He will 
then be divorced by his wife, I shall be divorced by 
you, and he and I can make a home together to the 
sound of wedding bells.” She didn’t add to her touch¬ 
ing picture any lines that might suggest the fact that 
only by arranging to be caught, as she so graphically 
called it, could she hope to become the second Mrs. 
Franklin. She banked on Pel’s doing the honorable 
thing, as well she might, especially as her diabolical 
plan was to make him believe that it was her brutal 
husband who had had her watched. After all, wasn’t 
it her helpful desire to relieve Pelham’s loneliness that 
would place her in a compromising position? Of 
course it was. 


272 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


And then she gathered up her things and rose to her 
tiny feet and held out her small but capable hand. 
Obviously there was nothing more to be said. 

And Beamish, towering above her, held her hand, 
wordless. She had found the chink in his armor by 
her appeal to him to permit the thing to be done 
honestly, for love. 

“ Thank you,” she said. 

“ What do you want me to do? ” 

“ Nothing. Leave it all to me.” 

“ But . . .” 

“ No. This is my affair. I will choose a lawyer 
for you and give him the necessary instructions. The 
rest is easy now. Goodbye, and a thousand thanks 
and the very best of luck.” 

The rest was, as she had said, perfectly easy, because 
she knew the ropes, and knew Pelham, and had com¬ 
plete confidence in herself. 

And there stood Beamish, alone in that empty space, 
but for the one-by-one arrival of the members of the 
band behind the screen of green stuff, and the cottage 
at Mount Vernon took much more definite shape. 

Outside, — blue sky, friendly sun, air purged of all 
humidity by yesterday’s storm, — our wee friend May 
took her smile into an eager yellow taxi to consult the 
lawyer of her husband’s choice. 


PART VIII 


I 

’Arry ’Arris stood under the tall man upon whose 
discarded top boots he had been wont to lavish unlim¬ 
ited elbow grease, heart-breaking comic songs and all 
the hero-worship of a romantic nature. “ Guv’nor,” 
he said, earnestly, “ you must let me out of this ’ere. 
I can’t go through with it, reely I can’t. I’m a bundle 
o’ nerves.” 

Beamish was equally earnest. “ My dear ’Arry, 
sooner or later you’ve got to live up to your present 
position as partner in the firm of Beamish & ’Arris 
and I ask you to make a stab at it to-night.” 

The combination of names, and all that they stood 
for, acted momentarily as a stimulant and flushed the 
veins of the gallant little cockney with a brief confi¬ 
dence. But when he threw a furtive glance over his 
shoulder and saw women in evening clothes and men 
in dinner jackets seated at the tables in the large cir¬ 
cular restaurant whose roof was the sky the needle 
began to sew a new pattern of funk in his solar plexus. 

“If we was goin’ to ’ave a bite alone,” he went on, 
“ I could do it and enjoy meself, and throw out me 
chest. But I’ve never sat at the same table with a lidy 
and s’welp me it’s arstin’ too much, Guv’nor. I’ve got 
to be broke into it by easy stages. So, if it’s all the 
sime ter you I’ll nip off, peck a few seeds at one of 
them ’elp-yer-selves, and bring ’Enery round to drive 
you ’ome. ’Ow’s that? ” 


274 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ A wash-out,” said Beamish, unrelentingly. “ Miss 
Magee has asked to meet you and there’s nothing more 
to be said. Put your tie straight, stand proudly on 
your hind legs and bear in mind that you’re my friend 
as well as my partner.’’ 

And so, with a tragic gesture of despair which 
would have won a roar of gorgeous laughter if he had 
been playing his part before a theatre audience, ’Arry 
clicked his heels and edged his way to the looking 
glass in the foyer of the Italian restaurant. With the 
nervous fingers which had been scrubbed until the 
skin was sore, he arranged the borrowed microbe tie 
and did his best to glue down the recalcitrant feather 
at the back of his bullet head. And when he looked 
at the reflection of the immaculate Beamish and at his 
own stubby figure in the cheapest reach-me-downs he 
could have wept at the positive horror of this occasion, 
as well as at the blind trust and what seemed to him to 
be the almost divine friendship of the man for whom 
he possessed a dog-like love. All right then, he would 
put himself through it. He would pull his gorblimey 
weight. It wasn’t the first time, by a long chalk, that 
he had obeyed the Major’s orders in the face of 
death. And at that moment death seemed child’s play 
to the certainty that he was going to eat with his knife, 
make gurgling noises with his soup and outrage a lady 
who couldn’t be expected to understand all that had 
gone to build up the faithful relationship that existed 
between himself and “ Good old Greyhound.” 

It so happened that one of those nice episodes which 
make life well worth living had been the means of 
introducing Beamish to Tocciano’s the night before. 
He had relieved ’Arry at six o’clock, taken the uncom¬ 
plaining Ford along several streets with all the entice- 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


275 


ment possible, and, after about three quarters of an 
hour of emptiness, had been hailed by a breezy person 
in upper Broadway and told to drive to the Harvard 
Club. During one of the hold-ups on the way down he 
had turned to give his customer a box of matches and 
been startled to receive a sudden order to “take this 
ruddy flivver to the nearest landing place and stop.” 

He did so, at a spot between two picture theatres, — 
one of the very few such spots. 

“ Get out,” was the next command. 

And he got out. 

“ Put it there.” 

And he put it there, looking into the excited and 
even emotional eyes of the man whose Arrow-collar 
face awoke no memories. The crunching of his hand 
brought the tears to his own eyes. 

“ Say, ‘ who the hell are you/ go on, say it.” 

And he said it. Damn it, he was only a taxi-driver. 

“ Don’t you remember that silly ass Dowling, Staf¬ 
ford E. Dowling, who was pushed into your squadron 
away back in 1917 and was on the mat to you for 
smashing up two busses before the end of his first 
week ? ” 

“ No,” said Beamish. That was an everyday affair. 

“ Don’t you remember giving a dinner to a pie-eyed 
flying man the night before he received orders to join 
the first contingent of the A.E.F. . . .” 

That was enough. Smoke, speeches, whiskey, loud 
and prolonged cheers, a sense of electrical confidence 
at the actual entrance of America. . . . 

“ My dear chap, how are you,” said Beamish, put¬ 
ting it there again. A burst of questions and answers, 
of laughter and friendly thumps, ended in a quick 


276 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


adjournment to Dowling’s pet eating place where it 
was cool and there wasn’t a band. 

Beamish, that damn great soldier, that long cool fish 
who had had his nerve under the most complete con¬ 
trol under all circumstances, that kind, stern beggar 
for whom, at a word, men had gone to certain extinc¬ 
tion, — a taxi-driver! God! 

The night’s business was ruined, of course, until the 
theatres began to empty, but something was said that 
might very well lead to the dissolution of Messrs. 
Beamish & ’Arris, take Beamish into the old estab¬ 
lished real estate office of Stafford E. Dowling & Co. 
on a good salary and commission, and leave ’Arris in 
sole control of Henry Ford. “ Why, with your per¬ 
sonality and whimsical smile, to say nothing of spats, 
you were born for real estate,” said Dowling. “ Come 
on round in the morning and fix the whole thing up.” 
And that morning, thankful to God for this lucky 
accident, Beamish had gone round, talked the whole 
thing over, accepted the management of the country 
branch which meant driving people to summer houses 
in a most seductive mood, and walked out to find him¬ 
self in a position to ask Carol Magee to look for a 
little house in Westchester against the day of his 
release. He intended to make a handsome present of 
the Ford to ’Arry ’Arris before they went to sleep that 
night. He was pretty certain that it wouldn’t be 
accepted, and that ’Arry would follow him wherever 
he went to earn the run of his teeth and his pillow and 
blanket by driving the car, and cleaning the house, 
and mending the socks, and looking after the chick¬ 
ens, and if there were enough space between the cottage 
and its homogeneous neighbours to afford a kitchen 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


277 


garden in growing potatoes and radishes and the 
succulent weed. All the same he would make the offer. 

“ I forgot to tell you,” he said, “ that Miss Magee 
served as a nurse in a British hospital all through the 
war, old man.” 

“ Oh, one of us,” said ’Arry, with enormous relief. 
“ That makes things a bit easier all right! She’ll ’ave 
met my sort before. Good old! ” 

And when Carol came in, quite as excited as they 
were if they had only known it, she received a royal 
welcome from both these men, especially from the ex- 
Tommy who, after giving an exact imitation of the 
Major’s bow, drew back, clicked heels, and flung up a 
vibrating hand to the back of his right ear. 

Dear God, what pictures came back into her mind 
of those old days and nights behind the lines in 
France! It was just such a born comedian as ’Arry 
’Arris who, riddled with machine gun bullets and 
without a dog’s chance of pulling through, had turned 
a twinkling eye to the nearest stretcher bearer and said, 
“ Home, James,” with what he thought was the accent 
of a Duke. 

It was a good evening. Their table was near, but not 
too near, the fountain in the middle of that huge open 
space whose pillars, bearing a gallery, were covered 
with ivy and which might have been as far away from 
New York as Switzerland, or even Italy, but for the 
fact that it was without an orchestra of black haired 
enthusiasts who went from Puccini to Debussy, from 
the popular airs of the old comic operas to the catchy 
tunes of “ Ta Bouche.” It was a good place, espe¬ 
cially on a hot night. It had atmosphere. It gave 
those whose hearts had gone to Europe, to the old 
places, but whose bodies had remained at the grind- 


278 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


stone, a sense of being abroad, of having escaped. 
The waiters were Italian. Explosions of Italian took 
place, like operatic recitative, every time there was a 
smash. There were foreign voices all about and for¬ 
eign laughter. French people and Russians, men and 
women who had fled from peace-ridden Europe, 
famine, disease, and falling exchanges, to find an 
Eldorado, gesticulated and jabbered. They laughed, 
and did themselves well. What did they care? They 
had suffered their quota. Now for a good time, — 
while it lasted. And here they sat until almost every 
one had left and ’Arry was obliged to tear himself 
away from a thousand reminiscences to take his flivver 
to an order. 

“ And now I must go,” said Carol, who had been 
laughing to the verge of tears all through dinner. 
Her host and his friend were not in uniform it was 
true, nor was she back in her nurse’s dress, but it 
seemed certain to her that instead of finding herself 
in a street in New York, gleaming with the eye-cutting 
electric lights of several theatres, she would be among 
the debris of a mutilated village in France through 
which there would pass a line of A.S.C. motor trucks, 
or the glassy-eyed remains of a regiment relieved from 
the trenches. . . . How soon would history repeat 
itself ? 

They walked slowly towards Fifth Avenue, cringing 
beneath the shatter of a train that passed along the 
overhead railway. It might have been one of the air¬ 
raids of which they had just been speaking. 

The Greyhound put his hand under Carol’s elbow 
to guide her across the street, and kept it there. The 
pent-up words of all those years were on the tip of his 
tongue. But she hardly knew him from Adam, any 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


279 


of the numerous Adams who had been so grateful for 
her smile. All the same he was a man with a good job 
and a good friend behind him, by way of a change, 
and it was not to be long before May had set him free. 
And so he permitted himself just this. “ I’m afraid 
our luncheon parties must come to an end, Bluebird,” 
he began. 

It had been so good to wake up every morning with 
the knowledge that she no longer went in and out with 
the tide like a scrap of isolated flotsam. 

“Oh, why?” There was a great disappointment 
in her voice. 

His fingers closed upon her arm. “ A pal of mine 
called Dowling is sendin’ me out of town to run his 
real estate show. I’m resignin’ from the taxi business 
to-night. But, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to 
dash up and take you out to dinner every night. Do 
you mind? ” 

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. 
“Mind? You have a funny way of putting things. 
But, of course, you can’t come in every night for that. 
Why should you ? ” 

“ Because,” he said, seizing the unexpected chance 
to put himself fairly and squarely before her, — “ I’m 
in this country simply to do two things, — to see as 
much of you as I can in the hope that when you get 
used to me you will like me enough not to get married 
to anyone else, and to work like a steam-roller so that 
I may be able to ask you to consider the possibility 
of sharing a house as jolly as the one your sister 
lives in.” 

He waited for a comment, an exclamation, an in¬ 
credulous laugh, but nothing came, because, if he had 
only been imaginative enough to guess it, this lonely 


280 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


girl was moved to too great an emotion by that simple 
definite statement, behind which her intuition enabled 
her to read the translation of a dream, to be able to 
speak. It came to her then, in a flash, that this one of 
her innumerable woundeds had taken her away in his 
heart when he had left her hospital, and that during all 
the following years of monotonous drudgery she had 
not been alone because every day she had been helped 
and inspired by the waves of sympathy and love that 
he had sent out to her. It gave a sudden explanation 
to many things that she had not been able to under¬ 
stand, — patience, faith, a vague expectation, kindness, 
a sense of being protected. 

And so, greatly encouraged, he went a little farther. 
“ You ought to know,” he said, “ that I have also to 
wait until I am set free from a war marriage, and it 
will be a year, probably, before this can be brought 
about. During this time I want you to consider me 
as on probation, if you will let me have so long, 
Bluebird. Can you?” 

“ Yes,” she said, and gave him the old smile that 
he used to wait for as he lay on the hospital bed as 
a man waits for the sun. 


II 

Poor old Beamish, the optimist. In talking about 
his freedom as though it were one of the few certain 
things he drew on what little knowledge he had of 
May and her characteristic method of going for the 
thing that she had set her mind upon like a hound for 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


281 


a fox. It once had suited her purpose to set her mind 
on him, he remembered. ... He banked, therefore, 
on her carrying to a successful conclusion the plan 
which she had no more than outlined in the Plaza. It 
was only a matter of time. He would have been the 
one amazed man in New York if he had been told 
that, by an everyday coincidence, those two people 
whom he had driven to the apartment house in Forty- 
fourth Street, and might never see again, were the 
very ones who were going to try to throw a monkey 
wrench into May’s machinery which would spoil her 
game. “ It ain’t always the ruddy Boche as mucks 
up our tea fights. Often as not it’s one of our own 
young R.F.A. sportsmen out in O.P. who gives a short 
range to the guns. It’s a funny world,” as ’Arry ’Arris 
was wont to say in philosophic moments. 

At half past two that afternoon, still suffering from 
the kick in the face that Pelham’s masterly piece of 
acting had administered the day before, Malcolm threw 
down his pen in disgust, jammed on his hat, forgot to 
pay his usual attention to the tactless parrot, and went 
out. Work was impossible. Concentration as elusive 
as a tiny ball in a spiral of water. Even if he were 
to receive another snubbing he felt that he must see 
Pelham again at once. In all honesty, though with a 
certain amount of irritation, he was very willing to 
confess that he knew nothing about girls. In spite of 
Beatrix’s flaming faith in Pel, however, he stuck to his 
point that he knew everything about man, and Pelham’s 
amazing behaviour in treating Beatrix like a sister- 
in-law convinced him that his friend was revenging 
himself on life by playing the fool with Mrs. Beamish. 
That woman’s confidence, impudence and malicious 
triumph must have been based on something. In 


282 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Pelham’s state of mind he would have hurt himself in 
a similar way. He knew that. And there were other 
reasons. But why argue ? Beatrix had brought about 
this beastly state of things and must pay the price; 
but surely to Heaven, as the friend of them both, he 
must make one more effort to patch the broken thread. 
He might find Pelham a little less rigid and unresilient 
if he went round now. The whole thing was a damned 
shame. They had married for love, these two, and 
Beatrix had rounded the corner and was ashamed of 
herself and supremely ready to make amends. And 
there was the boy. “ Oh, God,” he cried out, “ don’t 
let this be added to the appalling list of failures. Give 
me a clue, give me a clue. Help me to find some way 
to bring these two together again.” 

And with this prayer in his heart he presented him¬ 
self to the uniformed door-keeper at the old apartment 
house. “ Mr. Franklin has just gone out,” he was told, 
and stood irresolute. What was the use? He was a 
blunderer. All along he had been a blunderer. Hadn’t 
he been the meddling fool who had argued in favor 
of Pelham’s taking a trip on the Galateaf Fatal, quite 
fatal. A priceless piece of idiocy. Why hadn’t he left 
them alone to work it out? But he didn’t turn away. 
In utter humbleness of spirit he had uttered his cry 
for help, and so help came. He stalked to the elevator, 
let himself into the apartment with his latch-key, and 
went toward the living room to wait for Pel. Memo¬ 
ries seemed to rise and fly round his head like friendly 
pigeons. For five years they had shared these rooms, 
to leave them on the spur of a whim and come back 
with trophies. Like that little room in Carnegie Hall 
which vibrates with the emotion, ecstasy, fright, 
aspiration, triumph of all the musicians and conductors 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


283 


who wait there before their turn comes, and return 
uplifted with applause, this place rang with the echoes 
of the laughter and free-heartedness of good old days. 
Every familiar thing in the hall, the sporting prints, 
the collection of sticks, the armoire made up of old 
altar pieces of village churches in France, the heavy 
brass bowls brought back from Moscow, the Goya 
etchings collected in London, Paris and the Hague, 
that lacquer tray picked up in China, the carved wood 
from the South Sea Islands, the Persian boxes glow¬ 
ing with color, the gourds from the West Coast of 
Africa, the silver gong from the bazaar at Lahore . . . 
all touched the notes of his memory like fingers on the 
keys of a piano. It was a tune of comradeship and 
freedom, irresponsible wanderings all over the map 
that was played as he stood there, the Beatrix theme 
recurring again and again, because all through those 
times, wherever he had been, Beatrix, Beatrix was in 
his heart. 

But he drew up short at the half-open door of the 
living room. People were talking. A man with a 
hard resonant voice . . . and our wee friend May. 
He knew that ripple of laughter. Well, as that was 
the case, waiting was impossible. He would be shot 
rather than undergo that woman’s gleeful impertinence 
again. What was being said, however, held him 
rooted. 

“ There’s no need to worry about the slight irregu¬ 
larity in the proceedings,” said May. “ Major 
Beamish has left everything to me, and so I instruct 
you on his behalf.” 

“ And you will be responsible. . . .” 

“ Oh, yes, I’ll be responsible for the costs. That’s 
definitely understood. Friday night then.” 


284 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ All right. Friday night.” There was a guttural 
chuckle. “ The detectives employed by your husband 
will enter this apartment with your latch-key at mid¬ 
night. You will see to it that you are caught in a 
sufficiently compromising attitude, — in flagrante 
delicto, as we call it in law, — and the grounds of 
your husband’s action will be in my hands. Another 
scandal for the Vanderdykes! ” 

“ I should think so! That’s exactly what I want. 
Friday night then, at twelve o’clock. . . 

A chair was pushed back, and Malcolm, the unwil¬ 
ling but fortunate eavesdropper, found his feet again, 
crept back across the hall to the front door, opened 
and closed it with the velvet touch of a safe-breaker, 
and fled downstairs. If he were to wait for the 
elevator he might be caught. 

Good God! So that was the game! With or with¬ 
out the connivance of her husband she was going to 
trick an action for divorce, with Pel as co-respondent, 
in the hope that this would be followed by an action 
by Beatrix against Pelham with herself as co-respond¬ 
ent and lead to her becoming, Pelham being the man 
he was, the second Mrs. Franklin. It was as plain as 
a pike-staff. 

Well, what was to be done? To-day was Tuesday. 
There were only Wednesday and Thursday for action, 
quick, decisive action. Those people, between them, 
had the unsuspecting Pelham in a net, — always 
assuming that he were unsuspecting and not lending 
himself Quixotically to this method of setting Beatrix 
free. And this, after smashing up against a cul-de-sac 
of thought, Malcolm dismissed. Pelham, he knew, 
would go through the degrading business only in the 
regular lawful way. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


285 


Nevertheless the conversation that he had overheard 
between Mrs. Beamish and the shyster lawyer did pro¬ 
vide him with a clue. Yes, it did. By showing Bea¬ 
trix the way by which she could extricate Pelham from 
this revolting and cold-blooded trap — and how she 
would adore to rise to the occasion — he could put 
into her hands the means to a reconciliation, an expla¬ 
nation, a deep and true apology, and a coming together, 
unless, of course, Pelham stuck to his point, reiterated 
again and again, that the thread was broken, because 
there had been a mistake and he was too old. Such 
rot! Unselfishness could be carried as far as selfish¬ 
ness and work just as much harm. And the happy 
balance between the two could only be kept by — 
what? Humor? Certainly. It maintained the bal¬ 
ance in everything else, — when it could be found. 

Beatrix to a greater degree than anyone whom he 
had ever known, possessed this inestimable gift. All 
that was needed, he was convinced, was the right 
opportunity to apply it. And then up would go the 
flag of peace, and with all their niggling inhibitions 
left behind, after the great burst of mutual confession, 
the spring cleaning of two minds, these two would 
join hands again and get back to the precious path of 
give and take, less difficult to keep to because Beatrix 
was not, and never would be, one of the social sheep, 
a slave to the indefatigable futility which imitative 
women, without seriousness and with too much leisure 
and money, called Society. She would be glad and 
happy to kill her time with Pelham in the open, 
healthily, with games. 

Barging into somebody on his way, head down, to 
his rooms, Malcolm looked up, with an apology on his 
lips, and saw Pelham. It was obvious that sleepless 


286 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


nights, city streets, and home-sickness were begin¬ 
ning to tell on this man, unused to all these things. 
He had lost his tan, and was thin and drawn. He 
looked like a fish out of water, a hunter in the shafts 
of a cab, or, better still, a very wretched man, aston¬ 
ished to find that even he, to whom life had been a 
primrose path, was not immune from suffering, amazed 
to discover that all his chunks of money could pur¬ 
chase no better antidote for pain and disillusion and 
disappointment than the hard-earned dollar of the 
people who touched his elbow. 

“ I’ve just been round to your rooms,” he said. 

“ Good Lord,” said Malcolm, “ I’ve just been round 
to yours.” 

“ Everything goes wrong these days. A damned 
mess the whole thing’s in! ” 

“ Did you want me for any specific job? ” 

“ No. I just wanted you.” 

“ Same with me, old man. Which way shall we 
go?” 

“Any old way. What’s it matter?” 

They were opposite Duttons, with its tempting win¬ 
dows. Into the great gully the afternoon sun was 
falling. Never ending traffic of machines and people 
poured this way and that, all organized, all competing, 
all in the monotonous daily struggle of self-preser¬ 
vation to the syncopated rhythm of New York’s 
peculiar song. Uptown, downtown, East, West, it was 
all the same. Gullies, crowds, ant-like activity, shatter, 
the reek of oil, syncopation, self-preservation, but, 
praise be to God, sun. 

“ This way, then,” said Malcolm, facing the wide 
round eye in the middle of the street that changed 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 287 

from yellow to red, locking and releasing the wheeled 
barges that churned the great canal. 

And so Pelham turned and went that way. What 
the hell did it matter? 

“ Can you pitch a few things in a bag and get out 
of this place with me?” asked Pelham abruptly. 

" When?” 

“ To-day, now.” 

An hour before Malcolm would have jumped at the 
idea. Nothing on earth would have given him a 
satisfaction so profound as to leave that fiendish little 
person and her plotting lawyer flat on their backs in 
the middle of failure. Then, too, alone with Pelham 
somewhere, what arguments he could have brought out 
to explain, or endeavor to explain, the Beatrix kink 
that was at the bottom of all their trouble. The 
scrap of conversation that he had had the consummate 
luck to overhear had, however, made it urgently 
necessary to keep Pelham in the City over the in¬ 
famous Friday night so that Beatrix should be able, in 
a manner yet to be planned, to prevent another scandal, 
turn the tables on our wee friend May, switch the 
white flame of faith on Pelham and earn her right 
to a declaration of undying love. No explanations of 
his, Malcolm had the sense to know, even if they were 
inspired by the angels, could bring these two into sanity 
again so quickly or so completely as by a dramatic 
method of rescue performed by Beatrix herself. And 
so he said, “ Awfully sorry, old son. That’s quite 
impossible.” 

“ Why?” 

“ Well, you see . . .” 

“ No, I don’t. What are you doing? You’ve 
always been able to get away before.” 


288 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ Yes, I know.” 

“ Well then, what’s the idea?” 

“ Eve let myself in for several engagements that’ll 
keep me till Saturday at the earliest.” 

“What engagements ? ” He had never permitted 
engagements, or anything else, to stand in his way. 
For the life of him he couldn’t understand why another 
man should, — even Malcolm, who wrote to eke out an 
income that barely kept his head above water. It 
was funny. 

“ Well, if you must know, I’m going to drive out 
and dine with Beatrix this evening, spend the night 
and see the boy.” And this was true. He held the 
key, he thought, for her return to Paradise. 

“ Oh,” said Pelham, and dropped the whole thing 
like a red-hot cinder. But his face was flooded with 
an expression of the most exquisite pain as though 
some devil had taken hold of his heart with a pair of 
tweezers and twisted it round. Would to God that 
he were going to dine with Beatrix and spend the night 
and see the boy . . . and after five minutes’ silence, 
during which Malcolm eyed him sideways in the deep¬ 
est sympathy, he summed up that most foolish and 
regrettable of temperamental muddles in his friend’s 
recurring phrase, “ It’s a damned shame,” added “ so 
long, then, give my love to the boy,” turned on his 
heel and went — where ? What the hell did it matter ? 


Ill 


Not on the terrace looking out on a peaceful sweep 
of undulating country with here and there a delicate 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


289 


steeple rising to a cloudless sky, and not in Beatrix’s 
favorite place in the rose garden under the last of 
the day’s most generous sun, but, rightly enough, in 
Pelham’s den with all its strong reminders of that 
simple man, with the door shut, and in a voice too low 
to be caught by the anxious but unscrupulous ear of 
the little brown woman who was fluttering about like 
a hen with a brood of ducks, Malcolm told his story. 
And while he spoke, painting a rapid picture of all 
that had occurred that lucky afternoon, helped as he 
had been to find a clue to the solution of this domestic 
cataclysm, he was strongly conscious of the fact that 
here was not any of the numerous Beatrixes that he 
had known and loved, — the lonely, large-eyed child, 
watched and guarded like the only daughter of a Czar, 
old and wise before her time; the long-legged flapper, 
isolated behind the hedges of a grotesque up-bringing; 
the uncurable debutante feeling her wings with all the 
pent-up curiosity of a released bird; the autocrat 
brought down by love as by an arrow, the young 
mother reacting to a second freedom and the back¬ 
wash of an adolescence not yet fully spent, but a 
Beatrix who had set out deliberately against the sane, 
kind warnings of her better self, partly from a dis¬ 
torted sense of mischief, and a niggling desire for 
revenge, and partly to gratify the craving for romance 
that is deep in the nature of every girl to hurt the 
pride and sense of justice of an unimaginative man 
and had had her ears boxed, — a Beatrix healthy and 
humble, who had come out of all the tides and eddies 
of the shallow waters of youth into the depths of 
grown-up people to look honestly at her responsi¬ 
bility and make the most generous amends for her 
spring madness. It made him feel rather old, and all 


290 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


the more eager to help. If he hadn’t found this Beatrix, 
but one of the others in these various stages of evolu¬ 
tion, he would have gone back immediately to Pelham, 
pitched a few things in a bag, and got out. She 
wouldn’t have been worth the fight, lovely though she 
was. No girl is worth fighting for, however beautiful 
her body may be, if her mind is muddled and she 
insists on remaining among the category of fools. 
Not worth fighting for and not worth the space she 
occupies upon a crowded earth. 

And when the story had been told, with no sug¬ 
gestion added as to how to turn the Beamish trap upon 
herself, — he was dealing with a brain more fertile 
than his own, — Malcolm dried up completely and 
lit his pipe. He, too, had learned his lesson, had 
proved himself a blunderer, and would interfere no 
more. 

And after the blood had rushed to her forehead, and 
her nostrils had illustrated all the gamut of her feel¬ 
ings, Beatrix got up and walked about, as she always 
did when something had to be done. “ Um,” she said, 
“ um,” and touched things here and there, moved a 
chair away to make a freer path, straightened out a 
rut in the carpet with her foot, took deep breaths, and 
gave out enough vitality to make the room pulse as 
by the hidden engines of a ship. Once in a while she 
drew up short for a moment, with a wrinkle in her 
forehead, and when she re-commenced her fish-like 
movements round that bowl of a room Malcolm could 
see that she was looking through its walls, that she had 
gone in spirit to Pelham’s apartment opposite the 
Plaza, and with a growing feeling of exhilaration was 
formulating a plan to confound and humiliate the 
tricky Mrs. Beamish and bring all her own power 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


291 


of charm and newly-acquired honesty to bear upon the 
man who had taken her literally when she had been 
playing with symbols. Win or lose, regain or never 
recover, — it had come to that. 

Finally she stopped, lit one of the cigarettes that 
Pel had kept there for her use — tobacco was good 
enough for him — and stood in front of the solemn 
man in goggles. 

“ Thanks most awfully, Mally,” she said. “ You’ve 
given me my chance and I shall take it. You asked 
for help to-day and got it. I shall take a leaf out of 
your book from now until I bring Pel home, and 
please God I shall get it too. There’s nothing, just 
nothing in the whole of life that I want so much as 
to stand outside this room once more and listen to the 
sound of a pipe being knocked out on the ring on 
Pelham’s finger. I’ve missed it. . . . It’s almost 
seemed like death.” She permitted two tears to run 
all down her cheeks. 

Malcolm held out his hand. 

“ We make our own Heaven and Hell,” she said, 
and that was all. This man had been almost her 
only playmate, her father confessor times without 
number. But some things are too sacred to con¬ 
fess, and among these were her lonely nights, her 
agonies of remorse, her self-inflicted whippings, her 
inarticulate cries to the man who was needed and 
adored and respected and liked and admired all the 
more for his leaving her flat. Sooner or later, poor 
little soul, she had had to take what was coming to 
her, and either rise with courage and begin anew or 
scoff at Life’s brutal indiscrimination and ask for it 
again. 

And then she chose the most comfortable chair and 


292 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


sat on her leg, but not before she had repaired the 
slight damage to her face with powder and lip-stick 
with all that deftness and astonishing lack of fourth- 
wall sense that goes with our self-respecting girls 
these davs. 

“Have you had a brain-wave?” asked Malcolm, 
fully expecting to be told that she had. 

“ No,” she said. “ All I can see, so far, is that you 
must go back early to-morrow morning and move 
Heaven and earth to keep Pel from leaving town. 
For the rest I can see the vital necessity of my being 
hidden in his apartment on Friday night so that I may 
be able, in a wifely capacity, to be present at the very 
moment when May’s detectives break in. I can see, 
of course, the utter collapse of her diabolical scheme 
when I introduce myself as Mrs. Franklin, and her as 
the friend of the family. Your imagination is vivid 
enough to paint a perfect picture of the rout of the 
detectives and the whipped dog exit of our wee friend 
May, with the one or two things that I hope I shall be 
inspired to say ringing in her ears. After that, Pelham 
and I . . . But what I cant see is what worries me, 
Mally” 

“What’s that?” he asked, leaning forward. 

“ The base on which all these things must be built, 
— how to get into the apartment. That’s the difficulty. 
You have your key, I know. The doorman, and the 
man who works the elevator, can be bribed to hold 
their tongues. That goes without saying. And so can 
the Jap. But suppose Pel brings May back directly 
after dinner, as she will probably see that he does, — 
there is the great risk of my being caught by her. 
She has given herself the run of the house, you 
remember. I shan’t, of course, dare to hide in Pelham’s 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


293 


bedroom for that reason, and if I lock myself in the 
room you used to have and she finds it locked her 
suspicions will be aroused at once. ... It isn’t as 
easy as it looks, old boy.” 

It was Malcolm’s turn to walk about. The grim 
humor of trying to find a way by which a wife could 
break into her husband’s rooms in order to save him 
from being caught in what the law called flagrante 
delicto with a purring little woman who wanted a 
divorce made no appeal. On the contrary. He hated 
the thing, and held in contempt the whole process of 
what was called law which made any such proceeding 
possible to arrange. Nevertheless, there it was. They 
lived in a period of high civilization and astounding 
progress. Everybody knew that. The papers said so 
every day. Therefore it must be true. And any man 
who disagreed was old-fashioned, reactionary, moss- 
covered. Besides, argument was abortive. Beatrix 
had played into the hands of Mrs. Beamish and her 
lawyer, and although the dice were loaded the game 
must be seen through to the end. Tricks were the 
order of the day. 

“ I don’t know what to suggest,” he said, finally. 
“ My brain refuses to work.” 

Not so Beatrix. “ Do you happen to know who 
lives in the apartments above or below the one that 
Pelham has ? ” 

“ Ah, that’s an idea,” he said, stopping short. 

“ I should think it is,” said Beatrix, after it as 
though it were a rabbit. “ Do you? ” 

“ I know the man above, — Gifford Bartlett, Wall 
Street. An excellent chap. A friend of mine for 
years.” 

“ Is he living there now? ” 


294 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


“ I suppose so. I saw him at the club the other 
day. . . . Wait a second. I believe he said that he 
was spending the summer at Huntington. I can easily 
find out.” 

“ Find out. Is there a fire escape at the back of 
the house? ” 

“ Yes.” 

“ Then rent his apartment to-morrow, move in, and 
ask me to dinner on Friday night.” She sprang to 
her feet and did a war dance, with her eyes alight with 
excitement. And then she pounced on the poor old 
poet, the impractical man of rhymes. “ The telephone, 
quick,” she cried. “ Huntington. Scour Huntington. 
Offer Gifford Bartlett the earth and the sun and the 
moon, and don’t come back until you’ve got his fire 
escape. Run — rush! This is my only hope.” 

And out into the hall went Malcolm, the little brown 
woman scuttling out of his way, — her ear had been 
glued to the keyhole — and as Beatrix heard him 
asking for “ Huntington — Information,” she went 
down on her knees on the bear’s skin. 


IV 

And after dinner, as soon as Beatrix had departed 
from hints and told Mrs. Keene in the fewest number 
of unmistakable words that she would be better far 
in bed, there was another council of war. This time 
under the stars. 

“ Out of range of the house,” said Beatrix as she led 
her old and tried friend to the woods, — down the 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


295 


long slope of lawn, across the bridge over a ceaselessly 
chattering stream, and through a rock garden in which 
plants that might have come out of the drawings of 
Dore flourished on a modicum of earth. 

“Why? Has anything got about?” 

He didn’t quite know whether to congratulate him¬ 
self upon earning her laugh or not. He was rather 
afraid not. 

“ My dear old Mally, where have you been all your 
life? Don’t you know that the world is peopled with 
creatures who scent a failure a mile off and are never 
so happy as when they can spread the glad tidings 
of disaster? Since the morning after Pel drove away 
all the house has been buzzing. A row on the great 
day. A sudden disappearance during the night of the 
great day. What food for the carrier pigeons! My 
cook to Mrs. Whatshername’s cook. Mrs. Whatsher- 
name’s cook to Mrs. Whatshername and Mrs. Whats- 
hername to the country club, and from the country 
club . . .” She threw out her arms to North and 
South. “ Scandal! Hurrah, — another scandal! The 
Franklins have quarrelled. How splendid! Didn’t I 
always say that they seemed to be too much in love? 
Didn’t I tell you as soon as they came back from the 
honeymoon that things looked too good to be true? 
It couldn’t last, of course it couldn’t last. You know 
that girl. You remember all that talk about her wild 
doings just after she came out? That artist, the family 
flutter, the secret marriage story? How wonderful! 
She’s broken loose again. Young Greenwood was 
at the house. She went off in his car. Franklin flew 
at his throat, and rattled the teeth in his head, and then 
turned on his wife and beat her, and served her jolly 
well right. Gather round, gather round, drink in the 


296 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


glorious news. Another unhappy marriage. What 
fun! A divorce for the front page of the papers. 
How lovely! The Vanderdykes, the Franklins, Green¬ 
wood, the ex-flying man, and an English woman of 
title or something. Oh, yes, they’ve got her too! ” 

“Good Lord!” said Malcolm. 

“And you, — you’ve not been left alone, old boy, 
don’t think it.” 

“I? But where do I come in?” Poor devil, he 
was only Charles his friend. 

“ Haven’t you been down to see me, — once, twice? 
May not Mrs. Whatshername’s niece have seen us 
driving together in town, and her brother have spotted 
us going into your rooms from the steps of the City 
Club that rainy afternoon? A snowball, a skyscraper, 
a mountain! Wiz-wiz-wiz in the kitchen, wiz-wiz-wiz 
at the bridge table, wiz-wiz-wiz on the eighteenth 
green, wiz-wiz-wiz on the train, and finally, how glee¬ 
fully and how lusciously the wiz-wiz-wiz in ‘ Town 
Tattle 

“ No.” 

“ Why do you say no? Hasn’t that poisonous little 
garbage collector a flight of carrion crows who live 
on broken hearts and broken vows and triumph on 
wretchedness? ” 

“ Oh, damn those blackmailing devils! ” he cried out. 

“ You can’t,” she said. “ They have a place in the 
world. They satisfy the appetite that everybody has 
for other people’s troubles. These nasty little unhappi¬ 
ness gatherers with their itching fingers and long 
lascivious ears supply an every-week want. It is so 
comforting to read of other people’s failures when one 
has failed oneself.” 

The dead leaves of last winter crinkled under their 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


297 


feet, and the moonlight came through the still living 
leaves and made shimmering pools of silver. Ah, the 
clean air, the quietude, the beauty, and the sense of 
God. 

And suddenly, out there under the fittest foliage of 
a dream, she put her young golden head on the shoulder 
of that faithful man and cried and cried like a child. 
Her barrier of courage gave way for a moment, and all 
her pent-up tears came rushing out. She was very 
young, and the unexplainable passion, unfulfillment, 
urgency — what was it ? — had bounced back at her, 
and left a lasting hurt. But her tears were not those 
of self-pity. She didn’t belong to the martyr type. 
They were of shame, of untranslatable regret for 
having given days and nights of suffering to the man 
who was her man, of something like terror at the 
careless waste of happiness in a life where winter 
follows on the heels of spring at such a frightful pace, 
and in which the most frequent word is failure. 
Failure because the high aim is left untaught. 

And as to this counter-move, the plans for which 
looked very good on paper, thanks to the kindness of 
Gifford Bartlett who had lent his apartment to Malcolm 
for a month and telephoned instructions to that effect 
to the manager of the building, who could tell whether 
it would end in failure even if May were routed and 
her trick turned into a damp squib? At the end of 
it stood Pelham, humiliated as no man has a right to 
be, and who had been turned down, kept off, refused, 
who accepted the fact that the thin thread had been 
broken, and who had said over and over again that the 
whole thing was a mistake because he was too old. 

It came to Malcolm, out there under the trees in 
that quiet place, excitement having simmered down. 


298 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


just as it came to Beatrix in that moment of weakness, 
her courage melting into tears, that the word failure 
might have been written already, inerasably, on the 
board at the end of the road. Let a girl hurt the 
pride of a man and his sense of fairness by manufac¬ 
turing an excuse to withhold herself from him and 
however deep in love he may be the foundations of 
marriage give way and the whole thing comes down 
with a crash. . . . Doubts and fears flew under those 
trees like bats while Beatrix cried and Malcolm tried 
to comfort. But the white flame of her faith in Pel¬ 
ham never went dull for an instant, which was so 
wonderful to Malcolm, who knew himself and men. 
It rivalled the white light of the moon during all 
the incoherent outpouring of her shame, regret, and 
love, and terror, and he could see in her utter lack of 
jealousy in which he could hardly believe, knowing 
May and realizing her Eve-like attraction, not conceit, 
not egotism, but a belief that made him tremble. A 
man spoils his nose to spite his face and takes his 
revenge upon himself. What then? ... It was a 
damned shame. 

And so it was not with confidence that they said 
good night at last, those two, the wife and the friend. 
“ But I shall go through with it,” said Beatrix, “ it’s 
my only chance. And you will stand by me again, 
old Mally, won’t you, as you have always done, little 
as I’ve ever done for you? ” 

“ But I love you, my dear,” he answered, “ and in 
having that to hold to you’ve done everything for me.” 

What could she do, in thanking such a man, but 
take up his faithful hand and put it to her lips? 




ANOTHER SCANDAL 


299 


V 

Back in the city the following morning, having 
arranged to give Beatrix dinner in Bartlett’s rooms on 
Friday night, the first of the many things that Malcolm 
had to do was to see Pelham. He must be kept in 
town, otherwise the scheme, difficult enough to carry 
out, would go phut. And so, feeling like a secret- 
service man for the first time in his peculiarly above¬ 
board life, or the first secretary of an Embassy who 
was gifted to say one thing and mean another and 
smile and smile, Malcolm went straight to the bachelor 
apartment in which he had been wont to hang his hat. 
He was, it was perfectly obvious, excited. This was, 
as Beatrix had said, the last chance, and as he was 
bound to consider it, after his several talks with Pel, 
a forlorn hope. A quiet man, who delighted in back¬ 
waters, and who went for idealism as a bee for honey, 
it must be confessed that the unusual drama in this 
situation thrilled him. He was up on his toes that 
morning, with his shoulders squared, his glasses pol¬ 
ished, and with a feeling in his backbone that had not 
been there since the hour that America had thrown 
in her lot with the Allies. It was his job to help to 
save this marriage, to make up to Beatrix and Pelham 
for his well-meaning but blundering interference, and 
to have a hand in blowing up the indescribably nasty 
game of the Beamish woman, to whom, kind as he 
was, he had tqken a tremendous dislike. In other 


300 ANOTHER SCANDAL 

words, loathed like the devil. There is nothing like 
frankness. 

It was ten o’clock when he sprang from a taxi. He 
didn’t notice Pelham’s car that was waiting at the 
curb, and he was just about to make a dash for the 
house, after paying the criminal who had driven him 
from the Grand Central, when a high, warm voice 
called out, “ Morning, Malcolm,’’ and turned him round 
on his heel. 

Damn, — it was the Beamish, charmingly dressed 
in country clothes, with a Mistress smile on her water 
color face and a sarcastic hand stretched out. “ Pel 
needs exercise,” she said domestically, “ so I’m taking 
him out to play golf. Merry and bright to-day? ” 

He stammered something, he didn’t know what, 
feeling a fool, and most conscious of the fact that 
jealousy and resentment were stamped on his forehead, 
and backed into Pelham, who came out with his clubs. 

“ Oh, hullo. You’re just in time to come along 
with us, old boy. No arguments. Nip in and we’ll 
drive you round to your place to change. Gorgeous 
day for beating the ball.” 

May’s two’s company signals fell hopelessly flat. 

An almost feminine desire to spoil the day for this 
possessive woman, as he knew that he could, surged 
over Malcolm. Whatever she might have become to 
Pelham she wouldn’t have a look-in by the time he’d 
finished with the day. But there was his job, and no 
time to waste. “ I’d love it,” he said, “ but I can’t. 
How about to-morrow ? ” 

“ Full up,” said Pelham, whose Friday had been 
mapped out for him, and went to the car. Extraordi¬ 
nary thing, the change that had come over Malcolm. 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 301 

In the old days he had had no “ can’ts ” to bring up. 
Life had become all cock-eyed, it seemed. 

And did May miss the chance to appear gracious to 
Pel and get one in as it was perfectly safe? Not she. 
“ Too sorry,” she said. “ A threesome would have 
been awfully jolly. Well, another time, old thing. 
So long.” 

And away went the car, with Pelham as sulky as a 
school boy being dragged off by a governess. 

Well, it was good to know that he was to be kept 
in leash over the fateful Friday, and that there was no 
work to do about that. But what, in Heaven’s name, 
was the use of making women on the Beamish mold 
and letting them play havoc in an already difficult 
world? Very careless work. And it occurred to 
Malcolm as he watched the disappearing Packard that 
life would be much easier and more delightful if only 
those women who stood well on the books of the 
recording angel were allowed to have babies. He was 
in a greatly disturbed mood that morning. 

The manager of the building had been a German 
before and during the war, but when America went 
in he blushed out as an enthusiastic Dutchman, hang¬ 
ing the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina in his office 
over that of the All-Highest. Since the Armistice he 
had wobbled from one side of the border to the other, 
according to the opinion expressed by the public at 
his favorite moving picture theatre, but, at the 
moment, was truculently German because of the popular 
belief that France was emulating Shylock in her dogged 
intention to take her pound of flesh — to which, of 
course, she had every possible right, and would have to 
cut with the bayonet. And so the Queen’s round face 
was turned to the wall and over the picture of the 


302 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


ex-All-Highest had been pasted a very German drawing 
of a reluctant Wagner being conducted to a Reinhardt 
Heaven by a bevy of over-fed angels in Jaeger 
underwear. 

Malcolm found him sitting in his shirt sleeves 
beneath this disconcerting composition, when he went 
in to ask for Bartlett’s key. “ I shall probably only 
use these rooms over the week-end," he said, “and I 
want it to be distinctly understood that nothing is to 
be mentioned about my being there to anybody in the 
building.” And he added immediately, because of the 
unpleasant grin which spread itself all over the ample 
Teutonic face, “ I have some important work to finish 
and I don’t want to be disturbed, — even by Mr. 
Franklin.” 

“ I do not tink Mr. Franklin has time to disturb 
joost now,” he got in answer, with a rolling of nitrate 
eyes. Wiz-wiz-wiz on the door-step, wiz-wiz-wiz in 
the elevator, wiz-wiz-wiz in the office. If May wanted 
witnesses for the case that she had in hand there were 
several of them here! 

Bartlett was a thoroughly sound fellow, an excellent 
stock broker, and a golfer difficult to beat, but he had 
never shaken off the habit of so many imitative men 
of advertising his bachelorhood by plastering his rooms 
with nudes. The hall, the dining and sitting room 
and both bedrooms had nothing else to show. The 
effect was defeating, annoying and silly, like the 
chorus of the Folies Bergeres after the first five min¬ 
utes. It made one long for prints of Queen Elizabeth, 
and Early Victorian maidens in hoops and pantalettes. 
It was as small-town as a woman is who wears a 
million dollar string of pearls at breakfast or goes in 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 303 

bathing in all her diamond rings. It made misogynists 
of fastidious men. 

But the fire escape did run down the back of the 
building and nothing would be easier than for Beatrix 
to go down one flight of iron stairs to the window 
of Malcolm’s old room in Pelham’s apartment. So 
that was all right. And when Malcolm telephoned 
to Beatrix to say so, as he had promised to do, he used 
the mysterious language of the boot-legger in case 
anyone should be listening-in. 

To which he got “ I don’t understand one word of 
it, Mally. I hate codes and picture puzzles and card 
tricks, you know that. I must have it in full with 
every i dotted and every t crossed, please.” 

And so, laying aside his newly acquired secret service 
manner, he gave it in full. But when he said that 
Pelham was safe over Friday and hoped that that 
would be enough, because he didn’t want to describe 
the little scene outside the house, he was asked how 
he knew and described it. How, how, how, — to 
everything how. Every minute detail was demanded, 
even as to what our wee friend May was wearing. 
And then he boggled. A round hat with a feather 
was as far as he could go, which, he agreed, was rather 
an airy costume in which to play golf. Aunt Honoria 
was coming to spend two nights; Brownie, not daring 
to ask any direct questions, was sitting on a volcano, 
and the servants were going about wearing the expres¬ 
sions of people who expected to be ordered to put 
on their life belts at any moment. Yes, up to the 
present mother and father were accepting the explana¬ 
tion that Pelham was obliged to stay in town on urgent 
business. But Mrs. McKenzie had begun to hear 


304 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


things and had just been on the ’phone. Wiz-wiz-wiz 
in the Colony Club. 

“ The Plaza at half past seven to-morrow, then, and 
please God we pull it off.'’ 

“ Please God we do, my dear.” 


VI 

But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men . . . 

At half past six on Friday afternoon, having just 
returned from spending the day with May, the appal¬ 
lingly unconscious Pelham went off at a tangent which 
blew everything sky-high. Bored to utter extinction, 
he went to the telephone, managed to procure Mrs. 
McKenzie’s number after speaking to an irate Jewish 
gentleman in Brooklyn and an ex-Brigadier General 
of the Russian army who was peeling potatoes in a 
stuffy restaurant in the Fifties, and was answered by 
the Beamish, who had just risen glistening from her 
bath. 

“ I’m awfully sorry,” he said, “ but I’m afraid I 
must ask you to scratch dinner to-night, if you 
will . . .” 

“ Wh-at?” 

“ Yes, I know. It’s a rotten nuisance and I’m fright¬ 
fully sick about it, but as a matter of fact ” — What 
on earth was he to say? — “ something’s gone wrong 
in the engine room of the Galatea and I’ve got to go 
along at once and see about it.” It was a brain wave. 
“ I’m desperately sorry, but I'm sure you’ll understand, 
and if you will lunch with me to-morrow I’ll tell you 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


305 


exactly what’s happened.” And he rang off quickly, 
hoping she would assume that they had been cut off 
by an operator who objected to long conversations 
and was doing her best to revive the lost art of letter¬ 
writing. A worthy idea, and when, as he knew that 
it would, in the course of a few minutes, the bell began 
to ring and ring, he stood grinning at the instrument 
that ruins peace and smashes seclusion and let the 
damned thing ring. He was fed up. He could stand 
no more, not another second, of our wee friend May. 
He did not want ever to see her again, or listen to 
her constant prattle, or watch the changing expres¬ 
sions on her pretty baby face. He was through. 
Mafische. He was going to leave the receiver off, 
send the Jap away, chuck dinner, mix a three finger 
whiskey peg, and take a book to bed. If he were 
obliged to read he would, but if sleep were kind 
enough to come and put him as nearly out of that 
cock-eyed life as death, he would be the most grateful 
man among all the swarming millions in the City. 

Which, as May announced to that nice bedroom 
which Elizabeth McKenzie had just made up her mind 
to reclaim, put the whole blessed thing in the cart. 
“ Once aboard the Galatea she thought, drying in 
the warm air, “ and he’ll be so glad to be among men 
that he’ll certainly stay the night. For two days he’s 
had the pipe and a yarn look in his eyes that Valentine 
used to get after, his leave at home. Once that comes 
a woman has to use a megaphone to be heard by and 
a searchlight to be seen in. Lunch to-morrow? Bosh. 
With the Captain and the mate and the engineer, the 
sun on the yacht and no telephone he’ll be missing for 
a week. I know that man! He’s only managed to 
stick to me all this time because Malcolm has had 


306 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


things to do. I feel as though I had a hole between 
my eyes from his having gazed clean through my 
head. I shall thrill with all the ecstasy of a Nun when 
someone kisses me. It’s been the oddest time that I’ve 
ever spent. These men of one woman. . . . And now 
what, pray? A postponement and more work, is all 
I can see. Shiedsteiner will have left his office and 
the two detectives will have to be headed off. That’s 
all. I shall have to hang about in a taxi until they turn 
up, take back the latch-key, tell them the performance 
won’t be held owing to the unavoidable absence of the 
leading man, and potter home to bed. How I hate 
failure. I ought not to have let him out of my sight. 
A nice expensive bath, this, ye gods! . . . But I must 
eat, I know that. And I have a longing for caviare. 
The old hen’s probably dining out and I’m doomed 
to go somewhere alone. Which means a tea shop and 
paper napkins, a lukewarm chop and the furtive goo- 
goos of clubless clerks. Filthy! I wonder if I could 
get hold of Val and do it decently? ” 

No sooner thought than acted upon. But no. 
Major Beamish was out, — was, as a matter of fact, 
on his way to meet Carol. Luck had turned its fickle 
back. Wait a minute. How about that widower, 
Mitchell Burrows, who had sent flowers several times 
and given her half a dozen mixtures of sentimentality 
and friskiness on the telephone, — McKenzies’ friend, 
sixty, with a face like that of an overfed Pomeranian, 
very rich. He would fall over himself to take her out 
to a tete-a-tete dinner, and as a second string . . . 
But no. Sooner a tea shop with the evening paper 
than those round watery eyes and the bronchial chuckle. 
He was a last resort. 

Elizabeth McKenzie’s cold shoulder on the way 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


307 


downstairs, and her telegraphic answer to the usual 
cheery greetings, sent May on her way to Madison 
Avenue with the certain knowledge that her economical 
days and nights were drawing to an end. It never 
rained but it poured. By Jove, it began to be funny, 
— so confoundedly funny, in fact, that May took a 
tiny smile in with her to the “Come Right Inn.” A 
sense of the ridiculous enables one to revel in the dis¬ 
comfiture and misery of others. A sense of humor 
gives one the faculty of enjoying the frustration of 
oneself. This rarest of gifts is not born, but acquired 
after long practice, and is only to be found in the 
constitutions of Prime Ministers, younger sons, and 
women who are obliged to earn their livings. 


VII 

And at this moment Malcolm handed Beatrix out 
of her car at the main entrance of the Plaza Hotel. 

“ Dear old boy,” she said, squeezing his hand and 
thus conferring upon him the Order of Merit. “ And 
the program is . . .” 

“ Dine here, if you don’t mind. When I said 
dinner in Bartlett’s rooms I forgot that there would 
be no servants there. Or we can go to any one of the 
numerous places within a stone’s throw, whichever 
you like.” Too late he felt that he might have laid 
in a delicatessen meal and picnicked among the nudes. 
He was a man whose epigrams came to him the morn¬ 
ing after he had made his speech 

“Here,” she said, to his great relief, “because 


308 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


there’s a band, and I want to hear music to-night.” 
And then she turned to the chauffeur, who was all eyes 
and ears. (Wiz-wiz-wiz in the kitchen, wiz-wiz-wiz 
in the garage. He would be full in the limelight in the 
morning.) “ Put the car up until half past twelve and 
then bring it round to Mr. Franklin’s place. Don’t be 
late, please.” 

From where she stood, so amazingly young and cool 
and courageous, with the false light of hundreds of 
electric lamps on her fair hair and wide apart eyes 
and heart breaking profile, she could see the dirty 
white building in which she believed that she was 
presently to string herself up to the great moment of 
rescue and, as she hoped and prayed, of reconciliation, 
to kiss again with tears. The sun had gone out of 
the sky to do its duty by Australia, and the City lay 
under the slowly failing daylight, soft, melancholy; 
the coming night anticipated by street globes and car 
lamps moving like early fire-flies. The conscientious 
routine of nature had brought forth its pale moon, and 
one by one its stars came out in the clear sky. A God- 
sent breeze had rolled away the static heat and was 
perfuming the streets with the faint odor of flowers. 
There was a perceptible easing down in the sweep of 
people, and the charge of traffic; and although the 
incessant symphony went on it could be detected by 
a keen ear that many members of the great orchestra 
had slipped away to rest. 

They went through the carpetless foyer and the tea- 
fight room to the new long dining hall which was 
sparsely filled with people whose business chained them 
to the town. The band was playing the wistful music 
of Le Coq d'Or which lifted Malcolm to the place 
between earth and heaven where the living dead lean 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


309 


over to catch a sight of former loves and waft the 
messages that few can hear. They didn’t speak until 
the poignant melody had ceased. 

“ Ha! ” said Beatrix. “ I needed that.” 

“ And I,” said Malcolm. 

He beckoned to the waiter who had respected their 
desire to listen, the flotsam, perhaps, of one of the 
broken countries of which America is full, and handed 
the menu hopelessly to his guest. He never knew 
what to order to eat, and hardly ever what he ate 
when it came. And there they sat, enduring the diffi¬ 
cult process of killing time, for hours, until two by two 
the other diners had filtered away, and the band had 
gone to rest and think of everything but music. 

They talked, spasmodically, between the tunes; once 
or twice about the ordeal which, they had every reason 
to believe, still faced them; its details, the cleverness 
and cunning of May, the dirtiness of law; but this 
they did with that affectation of indifference which the 
fear of showing fear brought to such perfection in the 
trenches. They, too, had, presently, to go over the 
top, and not for a single instant did the needle cease 
to sew them through and through. If they had had 
wind of the fact, suddenly, during those trying hours, 
that their job was scratched, the effort for which they 
had strung themselves was a wash-out, the reaction 
would have left them angry, with a sense of having 
been misused. 

And then, at last, they left, the waiter wondering 
how soon they were going to be divorced; made their 
way across the street, entered the dirty white house 
whose days were probably numbered, and were taken 
up to Bartlett’s rooms with still an hour to kill. After 
Beatrix had looked at picture after picture, “ No won- 


310 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


der your friend Bartlett’s afraid of getting married,” 
she said, and chose the window seat in the sitting room. 

“ Will you have all the lights,” asked Malcolm, “ or 
the one here on the table? ” He would have preferred 
them all, being nervous and depressed, but he remem¬ 
bered that Beatrix had moods about lights and waited 
for her orders. 

“ All out, old boy,” she said, and waved her hand 
towards the gleaming scene below. 

There might have been a carnival in the Park. Not 
hundreds, but thousands, of small round spots glistened 
between the leaves in a vast irregular pattern like that 
of stars. And in the wide fringe of mammoth houses 
uncountable windows lent their squares of yellow 
fire. It was fairyland. 

“ What have you been thinking about all this time? ” 
he asked, drawing up a chair. 

“ Marriage,” she said. 

“ Oh.” And he accepted the fact, which was obvious 
from her tone, that she had discovered the germ of 
failure that goes from house to house. He would 
have accepted more wonderful things than that from 
her at any time. 

“ Yes. I used to think that marriage is a very eas\ 
thing, Mally, that plays itself. A game of sorts, like 
Halma, in which a man and woman, being in love 
enough to play together, move little pegs of tempera¬ 
ment one by one, against other little pegs. And some¬ 
times the man wins and sometimes the woman wins, 
but mostly the woman, because she had the better head 
for games, and more finesse, and can fake with far 
more cunning. But it isn’t, as all this business has 
shown. It’s not a mere adventure either, but a voca¬ 
tion, a calling by the will of God, in which two people 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


311 


are in partnership, holding each other’s happiness in 
equal trust. And if both don’t agree at once to work 
for the success of the firm, and not for individual 
triumphs, there is bankruptcy and dissolution, even if 
there has been a dividend in the shape of a child. It’s 
mostly up to the woman of the firm to keep the names 
together because nature has punished her with times 
of sheer insanity when she loses her hold and slips. 
And then she’s cruel, and queer, and not answerable, 
and nearly always misunderstood. But there are times 
when the man is hit by nature too to make things 
even up, and being just as unnormal, though he hasn’t 
the least idea why, grows melancholy, gets frazzled, 
and ought to be with men. The golden rule is patience 
and forbearance and a knowledge of when to be alone. 
A little rest from each other, a silence, frankly ex¬ 
plained, and a joining up, with laughter. Laughter, 
that’s the thing, Mally, and open windows, and fre¬ 
quent spring cleans, and no barriers and mental hidings, 
everything out in the sun. And when a row is coming, 
or an argument, like a black cloud in the sky, some¬ 
thing that’s going to brush the colors from the but¬ 
terfly’s wing and leave however small a mark on 
happiness which is just as delicate, laughter, quick, 
as a means of escape, or flattery, which is just as 
good. And there must be the will to succeed, the 
daily prayer for unselfishness, the deep down, rooted 
understanding that marriage is the bestowal of God’s 
grace upon two people to put them in the way of 
salvation. . . . That’s what I’ve been thinking out, 
Mally, and that’s why I wanted no lights.” 

“ I see,” said Malcolm, who knew less about mar¬ 
riage than Bartlett and nothing at all about “ Art.” 


312 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


VIII 

But it was the light in Pelham’s bedroom, which 
our wee friend May caught sight of from the street, 
that gave Beatrix back her chance to renew her 
partnership. 

May had drifted into the Plaza Theatre after her 
indecent meal, in the tragic process of killing time 
that keeps so many of these places open, watched the 
comic picture without a smile, seen the Mayor at play, 
the little giants of Genoa in their separate lairs, and 
marvelled at the pompous inanity of a murdered tale. 
Then, at half past eleven, cursing the carelessness that 
allowed the Galatea to intervene, had walked into the 
avenue, waited for the two men who had been in 
Shiedsteiner’s office until a quarter to twelve and just 
as she was about to tell them that the trick was off 
. . . “ No, by Jove, it isn’t.” There was the light in 
Pelham’s bedroom window. “ Mr. Franklin has come 
back! Keep the key, tell the elevator man, if he should 
ask you, that you are friends of mine — I will prepare 
his mind to see you — and carry out the programme 
exactly to the minute.” 

What excuse was she to pull out when she presented 
herself at the door? It was late to make a call, even 
for one who had manufactured the semblance of a 
relationship that made anything possible. She left 
it to inspiration, which had got her out of many a 
stagnant moment, darted across the street, into the 
building, up in the elevator to Pelham’s apartment, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 313 

dabbed powder on her face and put her finger on the 
bell. 

What to do, what to say, what excuse to make? 
One, two, three, four, five — perhaps he had left the 
light burning and was not back after all, — six, seven, 
eight — what excuse to make, what to do, what 
to say — Think, you idiot, think . . . nine, ten, 
eleven . . . 

There was annoyance and irritation in the way the 
door swung back. Pelham, in his dressing gown, with 
his hair all touzled. 

“I’m — I’m ill,” gasped May, with one hand on 
her heart and the other fluttering. 

He caught her as she tottered forward. “ Good 
God,” he said. Her heart was thumping. 

“ An accident, — just in front of this house. My 
taxi — crashed. Nothing seemed to be the matter until 
I ... I tried to walk. Everything — went round. 
Like a beacon — the light in your window ... a 
friend to help. Oh, oh, Pel! ” She crumpled in his 
arms. It was a masterpiece of fainting. 

Picking that little frightened thing up in his arms 
and shutting the door with his foot, Pelham marched 
her to his bedroom, didn’t know what the devil to do 
when he had got her there, and laid her on the 
crumpled bed from which sleep had backed away. How 
white her face had gone, how hard her heart was 
thumping. . . . 

“Brandy,” she said. “Pel dear — brandy,” which 
meant finding the key, opening the closet, ample time 
for her to picturesque herself for those detectives. 

“ All right.” He was thankful to be able to do 
something. If it had been a horse, or a dog, a bird 
even, hurt, how easy. But a woman. . . . 


314 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


Off went her thin blue jacket, as Malcolm, crouched 
on the fire escape, helped Beatrix into the room. Off 
went the next article of clothing, as Beatrix waved 
her hand to the man who never had felt less like a 
poet or more like a man. Off went the hat and down 
came the hair as Beatrix tiptoed across the dark room 
and fumbled for the door. Down went that baby 
head upon the dented pillow and up went the top sheet 
to her round white shoulders as Pelham dashed out 
of the sitting room with a glass and a bottle and came 
face to face with Beatrix in the hall. 

What on earth — now Beatrix. Was everybody 
turning night into day? 

“ An accident to May,’ 1 he said, too worried to ask 
any questions, or do more than wonder if this were 
a dream, a nightmare. And in he went to the sufferer 
with brandy as the two coarse-jowled men in bowlers 
opened the front door and followed in their stomachs. 

Mrs. Valentine Beamish in Mr. Pelham Franklin’s 
crumpled bed. Mrs. Valentine Beamish with gleaming 
shoulders and hair in the proper legal disarray. Mr. 
Pelham Franklin in a dressing gown over pyjamas, 
a bottle of brandy in hand. Rioting, if you please, 
and hitting the high spots. Oh, Heavens, in a land 
universally submissive to dry laws. Could the scene 
ever have been more perfectly arranged, more utterly 
conclusive, more strictly legal? “I respectfully sub¬ 
mit, your Honor, that the overwhelming evidence, just 
presented by my client’s detectives, of this man and 
this woman caught in flagrante delicto . . 

And then, — and then Beatrix, framed in the open 
door of the bedroom (Good God, the grey-blue girl!) 
her dander up, her wits as well in hand as if they had 
been trained on the tan like a team of thoroughbreds, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


315 


seizing her chance with gusto, with a certain savage 
joy, as cool as a bright October day and as gracious 
as the Chairwoman of a Civic Club receiving her 
guests of honor at a luncheon. 

“ The doctors, of course,” she said. “ How splendid 
of you to have divined this accident. What a won¬ 
derful profession it is. But my husband and I, — by 
the way, I'm Mrs. Pelham Franklin — are looking after 
our dear little friend and as it’s really nothing serious, 
— more fright than anything — yes, that’s the door, 
so kind of you to come. . . . The latch-key? How 
providential that you should have had a latch-key. 
What a wonderful profession it is! Oh, yes, there, on 
the table, in that little tray. Good- bye, then. So kind 
of you to have come.” 

An ignominious scuttle. Two coarse jowled men in 
bowlers, which it hadn’t occurred to them to remove, 
following two disconcerted stomachs out of the apart¬ 
ment. The bang of the front door. 

“ How’s that? ” asked Beatrix, facing round to our 
gasping wee friend May. 


IX 

There would have been a moment of silence but 
that the window was open and the tune of the City, 
though played by many fewer instruments, rose up to 
the room. 

There was also a ripple of laughter, as the top sheet 
was pitched back and two high heels made a simul- 


316 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


taneous click on the floor. “Damned clever,” said 
May. “ Your game, my dear. Congrats.” 

Poor old Pelham, who knew nothing of women and 
not one blessed thing about girls. “ What in God’s 
name is all this?” he asked, bewildered, benumbed, 
with a glass in one hand, and a bottle in the other, his 
feet in bedroom slippers, his hair dishevelled, his eyes 
turning from the icy triumph on the face of Beatrix 
to the blasphemous amusement on the water-color face 
of May. 

“You can tell the story in more appropriate words 
than I,” said Beatrix, with an odd little bow. 

“ That I doubt. I give you best in this. But what 
puzzles me like the dickens is how you got on to the 
thing. Was I watched? Or perhaps you bribed the 
Jap. But it doesn’t matter. I thought I had been 
pretty brainy, — that accident was a gorgeous inspira¬ 
tion. I take off my hat to you.” As a matter of fact 
she was standing in front of the dressing table, rolling 
her hair up, in order to put her hat on. An absurdly 
tiny thing, in her thin blue skirt and dainty camisole, 
and gleaming shoulders, with deft quick fingers work¬ 
ing on her hair. 

“ You’re kindness itself,” said Beatrix. “ Is there 
any higher praise than yours? But all that doesn’t 
answer Pelham’s question, does it? I think he has 
the right to know, don’t you? ” 

“ Dear old Pel,” said May warmly and heartily. 
“ He really oughtn’t to be let out alone in this world. 
The mistake you made there, Bee dear, — and it was 
a howling mistake, — I can’t imagine how you came 
to blunder, a typical grey-blue girl — I jumped at, and 
in another second would have done the trick.” She 
made an eloquent gesture towards the shirt or blouse, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


317 


or whatever it was, that lay on the floor, treating the 
whole affair as though it were a slight contretemps to 
the members of a more than usually affectionate family. 

He picked it up and handed it over. “ Trick? ” he 
asked. “ What trick? ” 

She gave another ripple: as who should say, “ These 
men who go after beasts, — do they all know as little 
about women? ” “ The legal trick,” she said, shooting 
a smile at Beatrix that drew her into the inner ring 
of first class brains, so very small and select. “ A 
perfectly proper, well-recognized trick. An unhappy 
wife with a hungry eye to the main chance, desires 
to become a co-respondent with the ultimate hope of 
being married again, and so arranges with her uncon¬ 
scious husband’s lawyer, employed by herself, to be 
caught in flagrante delicto — with the other uncon¬ 
scious husband. . . . Need I say more?” 

If a table hadn’t been handy Pelham might have 
dropped the bottle, — a too expensive accident in these 
days of triumphant bootlegging. 

“ And you, dear old thing, were the ultimatum of 
the scheme, and it seemed to me, in putting two and 
two together, — I gathered that you were also looking 
into the simple methods of divorce, although you were 
very stingy with your confidences — that we could help 
each other in the matter. I’m at your service still. 
But, of course, now that you’ve been rescued, which 
proves that Beatrix doesn’t intend to let you go, you 
will remain a martyr to the cause of marriage and I 
shall have to rearrange my plans. Well, it’s all in the 
day of a working girl. It was well worth trying and 
I’d rather make a colossal failure than nothing at all.” 
She gave her jacket to Pelham who helped her into 


318 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


it, eyes blazing and mouth in a tight line. “ Your 
wee friend May/’ Friend! Ye gods. 

Then a little powder, quite unnecessary, a touch or 
so of lip-stick, one last corrective glance in the mirror, 
one more ripple of laughter and a valedictory wind-up. 

“ So long, Pel dear. I’ve bored you badly, but give 
me credit for playing horse. Do your best to see 
the humor of things. It saves a lot of trouble. 
Goodbye, Beatrix. Weep a little, and say you’re sorry 
for whatever it was that drove Pel out. He’ll fall, 
old dear. He’s very much the man. And if you pos¬ 
sibly can, both of you, stay married. It’s an excellent 
institution as things go, if wangled right, — that 
jolly house of yours, too, and all the money in the 
world. I had almost forgotten the baby.” She held 
out her hand to Beatrix, one sportsman to another. 

And Beatrix took it, with another odd little bow, 
and led her out into the hall. She wanted to give Pel 
the opportunity to get even with himself, dress, and 
do his hair. A man touzled is at frightful odds, and 
Pelham’s hair was the one smooth thing about him. 
And there she said, “ Goodbye. As it turns out I’m 
grateful to you for this. I do want to stay married. I 
did make a howling mistake. . . . What are you going 
to do? ” 

May shrugged her shoulders. “ Oh, I have a 
dream,” she said, liking and admiring the grey-blue 
girl, with her wide-apart eyes, and straight look, and 
young sweet body. Envying her, too, most deeply. 
Pel was an easy man to love. “ But I shall have to 
pay for it with rather more than it’s worth. A face like 
an old Pomeranian’s versus fifteenth century tables 
and an Abbey near the Sussex downs. At any rate, 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


319 


Val Beamish, who’s Elizabethan, will be thankful to 
play the game his way. So there it is. Good luck.” 

“ Good luck,” said Beatrix, standing with her hand 
up until the elevator had descended with May, the 
working girl. 

That howling mistake, — could it, oh, could it be 
mended ? 


Ten minutes later, or less, Pelham found her stand¬ 
ing in the middle of the sitting room, facing the door. 
He had dressed and his hair was smooth. “ So that’s 
why you came here,” he said. 

She nodded. She couldn’t find her voice. How 
she loved, and had longed for this man, who knew 
nothing of women, and oughtn’t to have been let out 
alone. He was worn, and tired, and had lost his sun¬ 
burn. There was the most painful look of home¬ 
sickness in his eyes. It was a damned shame. 

“ A rescue, she called it.” 

She nodded again. Oh, God, those lonely nights 
and days! 

“ It was done as only you could do it, but was it 
worth while doing at all? The personal satisfaction 
of knocking May under the ropes amused you, of 
course. It would have been the same with me, the 
other way round, with Greenwood, so suggestive of 
spring. But it would have unknocked the whole mis¬ 
take if you’d let it go through . . . and we’ve got to 
realize that it is a mistake. I’m too old. That’s the 
trouble.” 

And still she couldn’t speak. All the things that 
she had learned by heart and rehearsed for days, — 


320 


ANOTHER SCANDAL 


the humble confession, the appeal for forgiveness, the 
outpouring of love, — stopped in her throat. The girl 
in her, with its impudence and cruelty, anarchy, 
mischief, and experiments, vague achings and strange 
tangents had gone, like a fever. She was a poor 
little woman who had made a mistake, a howling mis¬ 
take, and had paid for it, and whose gifts of cunning 
and sex appeal, new honesty and humbleness were all 
choked by the emotion of primitive desire and home¬ 
sickness stirred by the sight of this man. . . . “ Weep 
a little. He’ll fall, old dear.” No, no! 

And after a wondering, blundering look at this 
almost unrecognizable, inarticulate, no longer girl but 
swimming-eyed woman, whose outstretched fingers 
seemed to send forth agonies to touch, whose loveliness 
called him, and shook him, and made him forget, poor 
devil, he cried out, “ What do you want me to do, 
where do you want me to go? I’m damned if I know. 
Why don’t you tell me?” 

And at this flinging up of hands to be shot, this 
abject confession of male subjection and weakness 
which she could have used in a triumphant renewal of 
her power to sway and possess, she rose to the best of 
herself, to the height of that moment, — she went 
down on her knees at his feet, with her lips, and her 
tears, on his hand. 


FINIS 


non-referTs 



§wv/vt)*q3sl 













Novels by Cosmo Hamilton 


THE RUSTLE OF SILK 

Sir Philip Gibbs says: “No man knows his England better than Mr. 
Cosmo Hamilton. ‘The Rustle of Silk’ is the best novel of post-war condi¬ 
tions that has yet been written. So many of the characters are recognizable 
that it w ill be amusing to see who fits the cap. The heroine is a most extra¬ 
ordinary young woman and in spite of myself I liked her.” Illustrated. 

SCANDAL 

“From the first to the last there is never a decline, never a wavering, 
never a false note in his portrayal of one of the most luminous, sparkling 
and thoroughly human characters in contemporary fiction.”— New York 
Tribune. Illustrated. 

THE BLUE ROOM 

A powerful plea for the single standard of morality in which Cosmo 
Hamilton has done his best work. 

“There can be no gainsaying the interest in the book.” — The New York 
Times. Frontispiece. 

HIS FRIEND AND HIS WIFE 

A powerful novel based on the theme that no unrighteous act against 
the established social code can be committed, without the price being paid 
as dearly by the innocent as by the guilty. Illustrated. 

WHO CARES? 

“This is the most artistic novel Cosmo Hamilton has written.” 
Philadelphia Press. Illustrated. 

THE SINS OF THE CHILDREN 

An American novel dealing with the relationship between father and 
son and the problems of youth. Frontispiece. 

THE MIRACLE OF LOVE 

The story of an English Duke who came to America in search of a 
wife with money. 

THE DOOR THAT HAS NO KEY 

A story of married life which tells what happens when a man gives 
a woman his name, but has never found the key to her mind. 


Boston LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY Publishers 













( 


f 



SEP 2.1 192J 




































































